Proposal about --help options and man calls

Proposal about --help options and man calls

[David Kastrup]

Frequently, git somecommand --help will call the man command to
display help pages.  I think that when it does so, it should pass the
value of the GIT_PAGER variable copied into the PAGER variable: the
paging happens on behalf of git here.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

[Junio C Hamano]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> Frequently, git somecommand --help will call the man command to
> display help pages.  I think that when it does so, it should pass the
> value of the GIT_PAGER variable copied into the PAGER variable: the
> paging happens on behalf of git here.

Hmph.  Is that to help people who uses GIT_PAGER but no PAGER,
or have both but set it differently (setting both and in the
same way does not make much sense).  But what it means is that
"git command --help" and "man git-command" would be paged
differently.  I highly doubt it is really desirable.

What's the reason to set GIT_PAGER and PAGER differently to
begin with?  Can people give examples of the reason why?

By the way, I would understand if there is a request to honor
GIT_LESS environment and if it exists export its value instead
of FRSX as LESS when we spawn the pager.  As some people do not
want S nor R for other programs but do want them for colored git
output that tends to consist of long lines.  This is a slightly
related topic, but different from the issue you raised in your
message.

Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

[David Kastrup]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Frequently, git somecommand --help will call the man command to
>> display help pages.  I think that when it does so, it should pass the
>> value of the GIT_PAGER variable copied into the PAGER variable: the
>> paging happens on behalf of git here.
>
> Hmph.  Is that to help people who uses GIT_PAGER but no PAGER,
> or have both but set it differently (setting both and in the
> same way does not make much sense).  But what it means is that
> "git command --help" and "man git-command" would be paged
> differently.  I highly doubt it is really desirable.
>
> What's the reason to set GIT_PAGER and PAGER differently to begin
> with?  Can people give examples of the reason why?

If I call command --help, I don't want a pager barfing at me.  Never.
I have scrollback for that.  It is my choice when I page and when I
page not.  There are manual pages who go through 50 pages or so,
however.  There are commands that fundamentally are connected with a
pager.  man is, for example.  But most cases where git calls a pager
(and that includes his way of calling man without getting asked for it
explicitly) utterly surprise me.  So I set GIT_PAGER to cat and hoped
that it would get git to behave.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it
doesn't.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

[Brian Gernhardt]

On Jul 18, 2007, at 7:16 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> What's the reason to set GIT_PAGER and PAGER differently to
> begin with?  Can people give examples of the reason why?

I currently have GIT_PAGER (actually, core.pager) set to tig.  Tig  
has lots of useful features for visualizing history and jumping  
between patches and logs.

But for everything that isn't git, less is far better.

~~ Brian

Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

[Steven Grimm]

David Kastrup wrote:
> So I set GIT_PAGER to cat and hoped that it would get git to behave. 

FYI, you can also set GIT_PAGER to an empty value to completely disable 
paging. However, "cat" does the same thing -- it is special cased in 
pager.c to do the same thing as an empty value.

Hmm, I guess that could stand to be documented. Patch forthcoming.

-Steve