Re: [PATCH/RFC] Fix for default pager

From: Brandon Casey <brandon.casey.ctr@nrlssc.navy.mil>
Date: Jun 15, 2010, 16:11 UTC
Message-ID: <gJV0lM_e77LzoiHR7moWdAApSZ7yI38lZ-w8kZwc97unWqtBc94nfg@cipher.nrlssc.navy.mil>
In-Reply-To: <20100610085952.GA8269@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On 06/10/2010 03:59 AM, Jeff King wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 10:48:31AM +0200, Tor Arntsen wrote:
> 
>> That looks good to me.
> 
> OK, here it is with a commit message. Other systems might want the same,
> I guess (Solaris, IRIX?). I'm cc'ing Brandon, who might have some input.

Yes, I currently set DEFAULT_PAGER to 'more' in my config.mak file on both of these platforms. The 'more' on IRIX is decent (it can go backwards), but the 'more' on Solaris sucks. I've seen 'less' on some newer versions of Solaris. Is it a standard component yet?

So, I think it's appropriate to set DEFAULT_PAGER on IRIX. There can't be many users anyway. It's probably appropriate to set it on Solaris too, if 'less' is not a commonly installed component on modern systems. I wonder how surprised existing git users will be, for those on Solaris platforms that have 'less' installed, when Solaris's crappy 'more' becomes their pager.

Actually, there is a 'more' in /usr/xpg4/bin that is much better, but it is not being used when DEFAULT_PAGER is set to 'more'. Junio created the SANE_TOOL_PATH hack to add this additional path to the search path, but it is only implemented in git-sh-setup, so it only has effect for git scripts. Maybe it should be added to setup_path().

But, I also think it would be nice if git fell back to the 'cat' behavior when it fails to spawn the pager, because the following error is not very informative:

   casey@<a_solaris_box> # git log
   sh: less: not found
   Broken Pipe

-brandon

Show 28 quoted lines

> Note that this is completely untested by me, as all of my AIX boxen have
> gone away in the past few months (yay!).
> 
> -- >8 --
> Subject: [PATCH] Makefile: default pager on AIX to "more"
> 
> AIX doesn't ship with "less" by default, and their "more" is
> more featureful than average, so the latter is a more
> sensible choice.  People who really want less can set the
> compile-time option themselves, or users can set $PAGER.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
> ---
>  Makefile |    1 +
>  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
> index 34b7dd5..6ad0aca 100644
> --- a/Makefile
> +++ b/Makefile
> @@ -930,6 +930,7 @@ ifeq ($(uname_S),NetBSD)
>  	HAVE_PATHS_H = YesPlease
>  endif
>  ifeq ($(uname_S),AIX)
> +	DEFAULT_PAGER = more
>  	NO_STRCASESTR=YesPlease
>  	NO_MEMMEM = YesPlease
>  	NO_MKDTEMP = YesPlease