less v. more ( & else? )

["S. Champ" <s-champ@postoffice.pacbell.net>]

On 02 Aug 2000, Kenshi Muto <kmuto@debian.org> wrote:
> Many pager software supports gzip-ed file.
> less, jless, lv, ...
> (But 'more' command doesn't support it)



1) 	nice. didn't know that less would work.

	this should at least make it into the 'debian-tips' package, as tentative as
that package might or mightn't be.  


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.

	a)  less offers backwards-paging (?) (what happens when a person hits the "Page
Up" key on the keyboard.) , which seems beneficial, and almost necessary for
document-reading. 

( 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. )


	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 )




	c) on what might or not be a down-side of it:

	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?







--
sean c.