RE: How dow we educate our users to configure less?

On June 28, 2021 4:51 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

To: Randall S. Becker <redacted>; 'Felipe Contreras' <redacted>; git@vger.kernel.org
Cc: 'Junio C Hamano' <redacted>; git@vger.kernel.org; 'Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason' <redacted>; 'Jeff King'
[off-list ref]
Subject: RE: How dow we educate our users to configure less?

Randall S. Becker wrote:

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On June 28, 2021 4:18 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

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Randall S. Becker wrote:

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I'm saying the **opposite**. I'm saying this should be done in builtin/help.c *not* .profile.

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Admittedly, I am in a highly complex situation, but it is a real
one (ok, two because of a diverged path between NonStop and MVS)
and there are hundreds in a similar situation.

My patch [1] should work in all your environments.

Your patch will work in the environments but not in the use case I
tried to explain. I do not want a single configuration of less colours
in .git/config or ~/.gitconfig. That is not going to work in my
situation. I have multiple less colour values that would apply within
a given arbitrary timeframe. The configuration depends on the specific
terminal type set in the environment, either dumb, vt220, t653x,
xterm, cygwin, all of which may happy in short succession. I do not
expect it to be practical to change my git settings to conform to this
patch, so I am trying to point out that I do not see how it can solve
my issue.

Are you talking about color settings? If so, what are the values of
LESS_TERMCAP_* that you have configured?

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The current support, using the TERM environment variable, which is
passed to git in all situations either by the system itself on through
scripts as is the case with Jenkins, is mostly sufficient for less and
git to find its appropriate termcap on all platforms that I use on an
ongoing basis (Windows Cygwin, NonStop OSS, NonStop GUARDIAN, Ubuntu,
MacOS, MVS, USS, Jenkins). The NonStop GUARDIAN environment does
present some paging issues that do not work correctly in some cases
with some terminal emulators, but that's the emulator's problem, not
the termcap specifically.

So what am I missing?

You still have not explained why this would not work on any of your
environments:

 setenv("LESS_TERMCAP_md", GIT_COLOR_BOLD_RED, 0);
 setenv("LESS_TERMCAP_me", GIT_COLOR_RESET, 0);

I am not saying it will not work technically. Suppose I have a terminal session using t653x, which is not vt220 compatible - meaning it does not use GIT_COLOR_BOLD_RED or even have the concept of bold red) and do a git log or git help. I have another session using vt220, which works as configured. I have a third session running in Jenkins that keeps things up to date and is a terminal type dumb. Your patch appears to imply that I need to run git config to change the values associated with colours to make things work, correct? So how do the three sessions all work simultaneously or do I only get to use one of them at a time and reconfigure when I want to use a different terminal?