Re: packaging vs default pager

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Ben Walton <bwalton@artsci.utoronto.ca> writes:

> On (old) solaris systems, /usr/bin/less (typically the first less
> found) doesn't understand the default arguments (FXRS), which forces
> users to alter their environment (PATH, GIT_PAGER, LESS, etc) or have
> a local or global gitconfig before paging works as expected.
>
> Would it be completely out of line to provide a knob so that the
> fallback $pager could be set to something more specific/appropriate
> during the build?

I think that is a sensible thing to do.  Something like this?

 Makefile |    6 ++++++
 pager.c  |    6 +++++-
 2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 268aede..342d49a 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -200,6 +200,9 @@ all::
 # memory allocators with the nedmalloc allocator written by Niall Douglas.
 #
 # Define NO_REGEX if you have no or inferior regex support in your C library.
+#
+# Define DEFAULT_PAGER to the path of a sensible pager (defaults to "less") if
+# you want to use something different.
 
 GIT-VERSION-FILE: .FORCE-GIT-VERSION-FILE
 	@$(SHELL_PATH) ./GIT-VERSION-GEN
@@ -1294,6 +1297,9 @@ ifdef NO_REGEX
 	COMPAT_CFLAGS += -Icompat/regex
 	COMPAT_OBJS += compat/regex/regex.o
 endif
+ifdef DEFAULT_PAGER
+	BASIC_CFLAGS += -DDEFAULT_PAGER='"$(DEFAULT_PAGER)"'
+endif
 
 ifdef USE_NED_ALLOCATOR
        COMPAT_CFLAGS += -DUSE_NED_ALLOCATOR -DOVERRIDE_STRDUP -DNDEBUG -DREPLACE_SYSTEM_ALLOCATOR -Icompat/nedmalloc
diff --git a/pager.c b/pager.c
index 86facec..f4c992d 100644
--- a/pager.c
+++ b/pager.c
@@ -2,6 +2,10 @@
 #include "run-command.h"
 #include "sigchain.h"
 
+#ifndef DEFAULT_PAGER
+#define DEFAULT_PAGER "less"
+#endif
+
 /*
  * This is split up from the rest of git so that we can do
  * something different on Windows.
@@ -58,7 +62,7 @@ void setup_pager(void)
 	if (!pager)
 		pager = getenv("PAGER");
 	if (!pager)
-		pager = "less";
+		pager = DEFAULT_PAGER;
 	else if (!*pager || !strcmp(pager, "cat"))
 		return;