Re: less v. more ( & else? )

[Gerfried Fuchs <alfie@innocent.com>]

On 02 Aug 2000, S. Champ <s-champ@pacbell.net> wrote:
> 2) I'm curious about why 'more' was chosen, rather than 'less' (
> or others ) for the bare debian 'potato' ( and, i'm guessing, other
> releases') installation-packages.

 I think more is more or less the pager one is expecting on a *nix
system. That would be reason enough to give it a higher priority over
less (as nvi is more compatible (even bug-compatible) to the well known
vi-Editor and is choosen a higher prirority as vim although the later is
the much more powerfull (lacking vigor, on the other hand ;-)).

> ( on a tangent:  these manpages & info-sheets need some
> tables-of-contents. after some time with perl and *roff, maybe we'll
> have a script for the making of these. )

 This could be also done by the docbook-to-man, I think. Would be a good
idea, though.

> b)  there is also the point to make about gzip-browsing via 'less'  (
> as important as some of those /usr/doc/*/*.gz files may be, this would
> seem to make 'less' a good choice for default-pager as-installed )

 I'd like to have w3m as default-browser ;-)  But I don't think that
it's up to us.

> i'm not sure of how 'less' would compare with 'more' on the total
> main-binary & dependencies sizes ( in memory, or on disk ) .  was this
> a part of what kept 'less' out of the  basic distribution?

 I don't think that the size of the package was the reason. I think I've
clearified what I think is the reason for that above.

 BTW, please refrain from sending to _both_ the list and me, I read the
list. Also, I'm a little puzzled why you answered to my mail but only
quoting kmuto's writing?

 Have fun!
Alfie
-- 
If you can read this, you're too close.