Re: [PATCH] Quick description of possible gitattributes system

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Andy Parkins wrote:

quoted

+ - prettyfilter
+   Run by git-cat-file or git-show when content is being pretty-printed
+   for display to the user.  If no prettyfilter is set, then it should
+   default to outfilter.

I'd rather have plumbing operate without filters (if it is possible),
so git-cat-file would not run prettyfilter, and git-show would run it.

That really sucks. I do "git show xyz > filname" all the time, and while 
it's been about diffs and commits, I could imagine doing the same thing 
for things like "git show v2.6.17:Documentation/logo.gif > some.gif" too.

Yes, I know could do "git cat-file -p .." instead, but since we added "git 
show", and made it do the Right Thing (tm) for blobs, I've come to use it 
more (which is as it should be: "cat-file" is low-level plumbing, while 
"git show" is what you'd expect users to use.

So I really think that the issue here is that the *pager* should do the 
right thing. Which gets us to:

Or at least detect if output is tty, so one can do something like
"git cat-file -p v1.0.0:gitweb/git-logo.png > git-logo.png" and get
expected result, while "git show v1.0.0:gitweb/git-logo.png" would
show the image.

Yes. How about just having the built-in git pager do the right thing?

Right now we actually wait for data to start arriving (commit 35ce862) due 
to working around a bug in less. But what if we could make the pager 
actually do the right thing here automatically? With "less" just being the 
default action for *text*?

			Linus