[darcs-users] darcs-2 help behavior
Dan Pascu
dan at ag-projects.com
Thu Oct 9 23:07:17 UTC 2008
Eric Kow wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
>
>> 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?
>
>
I'm not against such a feature. I'm against the fact that is enabled by
default, in such a way that it's next to impossible to disabled it
without affecting some other part of darcs or the other applications.
A --pager option to the help command would solve this nicely. It should
default to off, so the old behavior is possible. At the same time anyone
who wants a pager by default can add to ~/.darcs/defaults a line like
help pager
> Note that this won't be until the 2009-01 release at the earliest.
>
> Two other notes
> * to get help explicitly without a pager: darcs help | cat
> to get help explicitly *with* a pager: darcs help | less
> so as I understand it, this is a question of picking the right
> defaults
>
>
Having to always pipe to something is not a good choice. --pager is a
better solution IMO.
> * one potential disadvantage of setting DARCS_PAGER to cat is that
> you lose the ability to explicitly request paging, for example,
> hitting 'p' in interactive mode to view the current patch through
> a pager
>
>
This is bad. I was under the impression that this can be solved using
DARCS_PAGER (or PAGER), but if it affects other parts of darcs where a
pager is useful, then I will keep arguing for disabling automatic paging
and adding a --pager option that can support both use cases and would
make all camps happy.
--
Dan
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