Re: [PATCH] pager: turn on "cat" optimization for DEFAULT_PAGER

> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 06:24:45PM +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
>
>> > diff --git a/pager.c b/pager.c
>> > index c1ecf65..fa19765 100644
>> > --- a/pager.c
>> > +++ b/pager.c
>> > @@ -54,7 +54,7 @@ const char *git_pager(int stdout_is_tty)
>> >                 pager = getenv("PAGER");
>> >         if (!pager)
>> >                 pager = DEFAULT_PAGER;
>> > -       else if (!*pager || !strcmp(pager, "cat"))
>> > +       if (!*pager || !strcmp(pager, "cat"))
>>
>> Hmmpf. It's sometimes useful to actually pipe through cat rather than
>> disabling the pager, as this changes the return-code from isatty. I
>> sometimes use this for debugging-purposes. Does this patch break that?
>
> My patch should not change the behavior of PAGER=cat, GIT_PAGER=cat,
> core.pager, etc. It should _only_ impact the case where DEFAULT_PAGER is
> set to "cat" (or NULL), and bring it in line with the other cases.
>
> I am not clear on how you are using "cat", so I can't say whether it is
> broken. But if you are doing:
>
>   PAGER=cat git log
>
> that already is a no-op, and that is not changed by my patch. If you
> want to make stdout not a tty, I'd think:
>
>   git log | cat
>
> is the right way to do it (and anyway, when the pager is in effect git
> will pretend that stdout is a tty, since you would still want things
> like auto-color to go to the pager).