On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 02:42:19AM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: > I upgraded dpkg today and noticed that 'dpkg -l' now always pipes its output > through less, even if $PAGER is unset. The only way to get the output to go > to the tty is to explicitly pipe it to cat. > > This is exactly the opposite of how unix programs should behave - stdout > goes to a tty unless redirected. If a user **wants** to view the output of > a program in a pager, then they can pipe it to less or whatever themselves. > That's standard usage of the unix shell. Hard-coding a program to always use > a pager is wrong. > > It also prevents dpkg's output from appearing in the scrollback buffer of > terminal emulators because less (by default) switches to the alternate screen. > > > dpkg now also ignore the COLUMNS variable, which is set by default in bash > and other shells, and can be overidden on the command line as needed. With > this change, flexibility and customisation has been replaced with a single > hard-coded output format. Previous versions of dpkg used $COLUMNS, and were > documented to do so in the man page. > > This makes the output ugly and difficult to read on standard 80 column > terminals because the output will now typically be longer than 80 columns > wide. In fact, it's ugly and difficult to read on any terminal width > less than the widest possible output line - it's no longer an easily read > one-line-per-entry table, but a jumbled multiple-lines-per-entry mess. [...] I fully agree. (& thanks for writing this precice bug report, Craig.)
also, running eg 'dpkg -l dpkg' and then ending up in less is confusing
and breaking >20y old habbits, and then I press 'q' and get exit code 1.
> Please revert this change.
Yes, please.
And thanks for maintaining dpkg! :)
--
cheers,
Holger
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