On Sun, Nov 05, 2017 at 12:58:18PM +0100, Martin Ågren wrote:
> On 4 November 2017 at 10:28, Jeff King <[email protected]> wrote:
> > - the pager.<cmd> config is mis-designed, because our config keys
> > cannot represent all possible command names (e.g., case folding and
> > illegal characters). This should be pager.<cmd>.enable or similar.
> > Some discussion in (this message and the surrounding thread):
> >
> >
> > https://public-inbox.org/git/[email protected]/
> >
> > But I think you could find more by searching the archive.
>
> I'm posting four patches I have on this to save others from redoing my
> work and findings. These patches feel a bit incomplete, which is why I
> put them to the side some time ago (and eventually forgot about them).
Thanks for sharing these; it's nice if we can avoid duplicating work.
We'll see if somebody at the event wants to pick up this topic.
> In particular, they do not teach `--paginate` to use the pager
> configured by `pager.foo.command`. It is already now possible to use
> `pager.foo` to say "I don't want you to page, but if I later give you
> `pager.foo=true`, this is the pager I want you to use". That does not
> work with `--paginate`, but this can all be explained -- indeed, we
> document that `--paginate` overrules `pager.foo`.
Hmm. I think the current behavior is actually buggy. I assume the
documentation you mean is from git.txt:
--paginate::
Pipe all output into 'less' (or if set, $PAGER) if standard
output is a terminal. This overrides the `pager.<cmd>`
configuration options (see the "Configuration Mechanism" section
below).
That comes from 06300d9753 (git.1: Clarify the behavior of the
--paginate option, 2010-02-14). But I think that commit was just trying
to clarify that "--paginate" overrides the defaults and config, but not
does say "always paginate".
I suspect nobody really noticed it in practice because once you've
configured "pager.foo", there's basically no need to ever use
"--paginate".
> If we teach `--paginate` to respect `pager.foo.command`, it seems that
> we would either 1) introduce a small (and possibly hard to understand
> and explain) difference between the old-style and the new-style
> pager-configuration or 2) knowingly change the behavior of `--paginate`
> with `pager.foo` or 3) knowingly change the behavior of
> `pager.foo=false` as documented in the first patch.
I think I'm suggesting (2), then.
-Peff
