[darcs-users] [kili at outback.escape.de: Re: darcs-2 help behavior]

[Trent W. Buck]

Matthias Kilian <kili at outback.escape.de> writes:

> On Sat, Oct 04, 2008 at 10:49:51AM +0100, Eric Kow wrote:
>> I'll probably take the documentation patch into stable.  If I recall
>> correctly, the behaviour is check for less(1) and if not, try more(1)
>
> Wait a minute!
>
> It's more weird than I thought: not only defaults get_viewer to
> less, but in viewDocWith (src/Darcs/External.hs), if the program
> returned by get_viewer doesn't work, less(1) and more(1) will be
> retried again, in this order. Only if those fail, the output will
> be written straight to stdout.
>
> I really suggest to default to more(1) and zap those two additional
> "try / try even harder" attempts from viewDocWith. See attached
> patch.

As a mildly relevant datapoint, Debian packages are allowed to assume
that more(1) is installed, but not less(1) -- because the former has the
"Essential: yes" property.

I expect to address this with a Debian-specific patch to make darcs use
sensible-pager(1).  Sensible-pager is a wrapper script which tries
pagers in the following order:

- $PAGER (if set); else
- pager(1) -- an alias for the host's default pager (usually less); else
- more(1).

http://bugs.debian.org/501101