Subject: Re: "Read my lips: no more merges" - aka Linux 2.6.14-rc1

From: David Kågedal <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:48:27 +0200

Linus Torvalds <[email-masked]> writes:

> They have "sensible-pager", but not "less"?

No, you read my message wrong, or I failed to describe it properly.

sensible-pager is just an indirection that uses your preferred pager.
This will usually be less, but if a user prefers to use e.g. "w3m" (or
"more") that can be done by reconfiguring a symlink (using the
update-alternatives program, or even a GUI such as galternatives).

So no, they haven't replaced less with sensible-pager.  They just
provided another way to select which pager you want.  Setting $PAGER
will still work the trick.

Running "sensible-pager" will check $PAGER an run that if set,
otherwise run the pager selected via the alternatives sytem, which
will usually be "less".  The alternatives selection is done with a
symlink called "/usr/bin/pager".

The advantage is, I guess, consistency.  Different programs don't have
to encode their own default pager.

To summarize: on a Debian system with "less" as the preferred pager,
these four invokations are equal:

  $ ${PAGER:-less}
  $ sensible-pager
  $ pager
  $ less

If you set $PAGER to something else, the first two variants will run
$PAGER, while the last two will still run "less".

-- 
David Kågedal