[darcs-users] darcs-2 help behavior

[Trent W. Buck]

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:

>> As you very well put it ("I'd like"), this is a personal preference, not 
>> necessarily a good user interface design choice.
>
> For background to this decision, see
>  * http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2008-January/007011.html
>  * http://bugs.darcs.net/issue896
>
> I would welcome any more background information behind this discussion.
> I had the impression that more people specifically asked for this
> behaviour before we implemented it.  Is this something people feel
> strongly enough about to back out?

The current implementation is wrong; it assumes the terminal height is
always 25 characters.  I advocate either backing it out, or asking
terminfo what the current terminal height is and only invoking a pager
when it is useful to do so.

> This is a question of picking the right defaults [...]

I agree.  However, note that when done *CORRECTLY* an implicit pager
will not invoke a pager for less than a screenful of output.  I guess
this heuristic is available to less(1) users with

    darcs foo --help | less -F

My *personal* preference is that this should be the default, but I don't
feel strongly about it.