Re: [Announce] GIT v1.5.0-rc2

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 24, 2007, 18:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701241012030.3606@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <45B79D68.6040200@greenwoodsoftware.com>

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Mark Nudelman wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> The first issue that you mention (that we move to the bottom of the screen
> before printing the first line) is behavior that has always existed in less.
>
> BTW, this issue is documented as enhancement request #112 at
> http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/bugs.html.

I don't dispute that the "move to the bottom of the screen" is probably a good feature in general, but it is _not_ a good feature when -F is in effect (similar to the init/exit sequence being a horrible thing to do when -F is in effect).

So the problem is that it basically makes -F largely useless.. The whole _point_ of anybody using -F is that it turns off the "pager" feature for small output that fits on a page, wouldn't you say?

(The reason the init/exit sequence doesn't mix with -F is that many terminal descriptions basically have a "switch to secondary screen" for init, and "switch back" for exit, which means that together with -F, small output simply won't be shown at all - or perhaps it just flickers too quickly for the user to see it).

So this really is only a -F issue.

Now, for the init/exit sequence, at least we have -X to turn that off (and git does indeed default to using "FRSX" if the user doesn't have any LESS environment variable set), so perhaps the "move to end of screen" could also get another flag? That way it would be something that users can control - but see above on why I pretty much guarantee that anybody who uses -F would want to use the new flag too.

> Your second issue is definitely a bug.  Less's handling of -F and eof in
> general is indeed rather baroque and confusing, and probably needs a complete
> revision.  Some of the complexity comes from being portable to many (not
> necessarily Unix-like) systems.

Yeah, I tried to look at the sources, and ran awya screaming ;)

		Linus