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

From: "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:45:05 -0600

On Thursday 2008 December 11 15:55:55 Jeff King wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:51:15AM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
>> 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
>
>Try looking for isatty, which takes the numeric fd. I think the behavior
>you asked about would be this:

Thanks, this will be plenty of context for me to be able to crawl the archives 
and the actual history thinking about better behavior and considering old 
discussions.

>We are not talking about
>interactivity, but rather about where the output is going. So your test
>would consider this interactive:
>
>  $ git log >foo.out
>
>and start a pager, which makes no sense.

Good point, I'll try and consider that while I investgate the history of the 
issue.

>Now if you proposed checking stderr and stdin _in addition_ to stdout,
>that might make more sense, but I haven't thought too hard about any
>implications.

I did see a commit message mentioning some unusual settings for PAGER, but in 
general, pagers are interactive.  I'd think the default behavior would 
be "interactive <-> pager", with a config option to turn the pager always off 
or always on.  From there, I would reason the test for interactivity should 
be the POSIX test.

It looks like this test have have been attempting to follow the behavior 
of --color=auto to GNU less and GNU grep (and possibly others).  This 
certainly makes some sense as well, and may be less surprising.

>And FWIW, I don't recall this ever being discussed before, but then I
>have not been involved with git since the very beginning.

Google should be able to find it.  And worst-case, I can tell wget to spider 
the archives and then run some sort of find/html2txt/grep on them.

I'll go back to "the stacks" and read the discussions and commits.  If my 
well-informed self still thinks the behavior should change, I'll write a 
patch and open up the discussion again.
-- 
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