RE: How dow we educate our users to configure less?

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On June 28, 2021 4:51 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>To: Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>; 'Felipe Contreras' <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>; git@vger.kernel.org
>Cc: 'Junio C Hamano' <gitster@pobox.com>; git@vger.kernel.org; 'Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason' <avarab@gmail.com>; 'Jeff King'
><peff@peff.net>
>Subject: RE: How dow we educate our users to configure less?
>
>Randall S. Becker wrote:
>> On June 28, 2021 4:18 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >Randall S. Becker wrote:
>
>> >I'm saying the **opposite**. I'm saying this should be done in builtin/help.c *not* .profile.
>> >
>> >> Admittedly, I am in a highly complex situation, but it is a real
>> >> one (ok, two because of a diverged path between NonStop and MVS)
>> >> and there are hundreds in a similar situation.
>> >
>> >My patch [1] should work in all your environments.
>>
>> Your patch will work in the environments but not in the use case I
>> tried to explain. I do not want a single configuration of less colours
>> in .git/config or ~/.gitconfig. That is not going to work in my
>> situation. I have multiple less colour values that would apply within
>> a given arbitrary timeframe. The configuration depends on the specific
>> terminal type set in the environment, either dumb, vt220, t653x,
>> xterm, cygwin, all of which may happy in short succession. I do not
>> expect it to be practical to change my git settings to conform to this
>> patch, so I am trying to point out that I do not see how it can solve
>> my issue.
>
>Are you talking about color settings? If so, what are the values of
>LESS_TERMCAP_* that you have configured?
>
>> The current support, using the TERM environment variable, which is
>> passed to git in all situations either by the system itself on through
>> scripts as is the case with Jenkins, is mostly sufficient for less and
>> git to find its appropriate termcap on all platforms that I use on an
>> ongoing basis (Windows Cygwin, NonStop OSS, NonStop GUARDIAN, Ubuntu,
>> MacOS, MVS, USS, Jenkins). The NonStop GUARDIAN environment does
>> present some paging issues that do not work correctly in some cases
>> with some terminal emulators, but that's the emulator's problem, not
>> the termcap specifically.
>>
>> So what am I missing?
>
>You still have not explained why this would not work on any of your
>environments:
>
>  setenv("LESS_TERMCAP_md", GIT_COLOR_BOLD_RED, 0);
>  setenv("LESS_TERMCAP_me", GIT_COLOR_RESET, 0);

I am not saying it will not work technically. Suppose I have a terminal session using t653x, which is not vt220 compatible - meaning it does not use GIT_COLOR_BOLD_RED or even have the concept of bold red) and do a git log or git help. I have another session using vt220, which works as configured. I have a third session running in Jenkins that keeps things up to date and is a terminal type dumb. Your patch appears to imply that I need to run git config to change the values associated with colours to make things work, correct? So how do the three sessions all work simultaneously or do I only get to use one of them at a time and reconfigure when I want to use a different terminal?