Re: about c8af1de9 (git status uses pager)

[Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com>]

On 06/22/2008 05:01 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Having said all that, I have to say I am regretting to have accepted that
>> patch to enable pager on status, not because it bothers me personally (it
>> doesn't primarily because I practically never run git-status because I
>> consider the command useless and living almost always in Emacs helps), but
>> because in principle changing anything that existing users are used to is
>> bad.

I'm a bit late on the uptake here, but I wanted to throw my two cents in- this was one of the biggest usability flubs I've seen with git in a long time. I suspect (actually, I *know*) there were many users like I that used git-status all the time in the console to get a handle on what their work tree was looking like. That became impossible with 1.5.6 out of the box, and I have to spend an hour reading mailing list posts trying to restore the former non-broken behavior.

Why did this patch get pulled in with so little discussion? Didn't someone think that there must be a reason git-status didn't use a pager before?

On 06/22/2008 02:24 AM, Johannes Gilger wrote:
> On 21/06/08 23:42, Johannes Gilger wrote:
>> Wow, I just noticed it myself. Why was that changed? I don't know about 
>> your status lines, but I for one find it really annoying. Anything 
>> that's in a pager isn't visible in my console afterwards. What's next? 
>> git branch in a pager too?
> 
> Seems like I got ahead of myself there. After setting the core.pager to 
> less -FRSX everything works fine ;)

This is a terrible thing to force users to have to do. Not only that, but the interaction between GIT_PAGER, core.pager, and everything else just makes this change even more hard to swallow.

I probably came across as flame/troll here, but I felt I needed to speak up for those of us that never knew this change was coming. I would go so far as to say this should be reverted for a maint release.

-Dan