Re: [PATCH v2 1/7] git-sh-setup: remove unused git_pager() function

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

No, they need to know to call 'git var GIT_PAGER' rather than using
the environment variable directly to pick up core.pager[...]

Sorry, I should have said "...directly via git var GIT_PAGER". I also
see that we could improve some of the doc cross-referencing here,
i.e. "git help git") doesn't make this explicit or point to "git var",
but we cover this in "git help var" itself.

quoted

[...]should be checking whether stdout is a tty. That is why this function
existed and we didn't just check the value of GIT_PAGER in our scripts

For a hypothetical out-of-tree user is this really something anyone
strictly needs? It's just an optimization. If you don't do it you'll
just use your pager to pipe output to a non-tty.

The question we should be asking when we advocate to remove things
is "is this really something we absolutely cannot live with?"

But answering your question, if an out-of-tree user wants to behave
just like Git, pretending that it would have been part of Git and
the only reason why it is not is because it weren't invented here,
yes, not forcing the end-user to pipe the tool's output to pager is
something they would want to have a handy way to mimic, I would
think.

Thanks.