Re: [RFC/PATCH] pager: do not fork a pager if environment variable PAGER is set to NONE

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>> 
>> > This helps debugging tremendously.
>> >
>> > Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
>> 
>> I like what this wants to do.  I am not so sure PAGER=NONE is a
>> good convention, however.
>
> I am sure it is not.
>
> One solution would be to introduce yet another command line option 
> "--no-pager", but I find that ugly.
>
> Another solution would be to check if the environment variable NO_PAGER is 
> set.
>
> Wishes?

Honestly, undecided.  Not that I think people would do
PAGER=NONE to mean a program /usr/bin/NONE.

Right now, the following does not say anything:

	$ PAGER= git log

but I do not think that is a reasonably behaviour, either.  So
detecting PAGER is set to an empty string (not "nonexistence" -
the current behaviour of defaulting to "less" in such a case is
reasonable) is probably a better alternative.

A somewhat related topic; I often set PAGER=cat when I do not
want the --[More]-- prompt and I thing many Emacs users do this.
It might also be good to detect it and omit piping in such a
case, but that is independent, so if you are going to do this as
well, please make it a separate patch.