Re: git-diff should not fire up $PAGER, period!

["Mike Coleman" <tutufan@gmail.com>]

It's so cold here my car wouldn't start this morning, so I feel
fortunate to have these flames to keep me warm!  :-)


I still find git-diff's unsolicited invocation of $PAGER a bit
jarring, but I also find that I like it.  It has a sort of Windows-ish
feel to it (am I straying from the true path?).  It's convenient,
though honestly "git-diff|l" would only be two extra characters.  From
a UI perspective, the oddest thing about it is that all (not, in
fact?) of the other git programs which might also produce lengthy
output *don't* invoke $PAGER--git-status particularly comes to mind.
There are a large number of Unix programs that would be more
convenient if their output was automatically paged, but I'm not sure
it'd be better if they were all changed to do this.  (The best analog
I can think of where this seems desirable is man(1).)

To me, the most important nugget from the original complaint was that
git-diff sends its error messages to stdout.  I understand why it
might be done, but I'd worry about losing the stderr diagnostic for a
command that matters.  [I've been playing around with this for a few
minutes trying to see errors going to stdout and I can't reproduce
it--I wonder if they really do.]


Regarding the emacs complaint, as an emacs user I'd say I'm not
surprised this didn't quite work right.  In the particular case of the
compilation buffer, I wonder if the solution isn't to just unset TERM,
the existence of which (together with the fact that there's a pty)
could be taken as an invitation for the subordinate process to start
doing awful raw-terminal things.  (Similar logic applies to the
DISPLAY variable.)  Like Junio, I also eschew doing terminal emulation
inside of emacs.

Good evening from the icy midwest,
Mike