Subject: Re: fatal output from git-show really wants a terminal

From: "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:51:15 -0600

On Thursday 2008 December 11 03:15:47 you wrote:
>On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
>> On Wednesday 2008 December 10 13:46:50 you wrote:
>> >On Mittwoch, 10. Dezember 2008, Tim Olsen wrote:
>> >> It appears that when outputting a fatal error, git-show will choose
>> >> stdout over stderr if stdout is a terminal and stderr is not.
>> >
>> >This is by design.
>>
>> Then it is poor design. :P j/k
>
>Read up on the reasoning before trolling, will ya?  It's all in the Git
>history.

Seeing how I'm new, and this message indicated I had screwed up, I starting 
going through the 'git log' looking for a commit message that either 
documented this behavior, or indicated the commit had documented this 
behavior.

Initially, I was looking for 'stdout' or 'stderr', and found many unrelated 
commits.  I then figured it was part of the PAGER support, and began 
searching for that.  I did find an indication of why stdout and stderr are 
both redirected to the PAGER's stdin -- but that makes sense to me; I wasn't 
questioning it.  At least not too much -- but when the user indicates stderr 
and stdout should go to different locations, shouldn't they?

I was mainly questioning using a pager AT ALL when the git command is used in 
a non-interactive environment, and how git detects an interactive invocation.  
I feel this should be done the same way a (POSIX standard) shell detects 
interactivity, and that in a non-interactive environment git should not 
default to using PAGER.

Now, I certainly could have missed the commit message / commit with 
rationale / documentation.  'git log' output is a long document, and I maybe 
using the wrong keywords for my search.  It also is not all the documentation 
that is out there.  I'm not afraid to RTFM; but I'm not having much luck 
finding the right parts to R.

Finally, I didn't mean to offend.  I was hoping the smiley (":P") and "j/k" 
would indicate that a was only half serious and know that I don't have the 
benefit of following the project closely for very long.  I'm appreciative of 
the hard work that goes into git and don't mean to belittle that effort.
-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                     ,= ,-_-. =. 
[email-masked]                      ((_/)o o(\_))
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http://iguanasuicide.org/                      \_/