Re: [PATCH 2/3] setup_pager: set MORE=R

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 02:17:57PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

But there's another set of people that I was intending to help with the
patch, which is people that have set up LESS, and did not necessarily
care about the "R" flag in the past (e.g., for many years before git
came along, I set LESS=giM, and never even knew that "R" existed). Since
git comes out of the box these days with color and the pager turned on,
that means people with such a setup see broken output from day one.

And I think it is Git's fault here, not the user or the packager.

I am not particularly itnterested in whose fault it is ;-)  If the
user sets LESS himself, he knows how to set it (and if he is setting
it automatically for all of his sessions, he knows where to do so),
and would know better than Git about "less", his pager of choice.

If he did not know about R and did not see color, that is even
better.  Now he knows and his update to his LESS settings will let
him view colors in outputs from programs that are not Git.

Right. If git just disabled the color, I think that would be sane (and
that is what my patch was shooting for). But somebody who sees:

  $ git log
  ESC[33mcommit 3c6b385c655a52fd9db176ce1e01469dc9954f91ESC[mESC[33m
  (ESC[1;36mHEADESC[mESC[33m, ESC[1;32mjk/meta-makeESC[mESC[33m)ESC[m

does not necessarily know what is going on. They do not know that it is
a "less" problem, nor that their less settings are relevant. They only
see that Git is broken out of the box.

Anyway, I will leave it at that. It's an unfortunate problem, but one
not worth fixing.

-Peff