Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

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