Re: Bug#363250: general: Custom PAGER gives error on sid, but works on sarge

[Loïc Minier <lool+debian@via.ecp.fr>]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2006, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>         Since allowing pipelines seems to be the motivating factor
>  here, we do need to solve that, I think.

 Yes, indeed, the root of the problem is the change of support for
 pipelines.  However, I'm not sure that pipelines worked in the use case
 of passing a file as a parameter to $PAGER in the past.

 Currently, each program (for example man) has its way of calling
 $PAGER, perhaps as "$PAGER <file name>" or piping to "sh -c "$PAGER"",
 or perhaps piping directly to "$PAGER".

 Of course, if we say $PAGER can be a pipeline, and a pager can be used
 both as "$PAGER <file name>" and as the end of a pipeline, then
 defining $PAGER to be a pipeline must work in both cases, but I'm not
 sure it is a regression to not support pipelines in the use case of a
 file name as argument.

 In other words:

                                $PAGER is a             $PAGER is a
                                program                 pipeline
 ====================================================================
 call $PAGER as                 works                   ???
 $PAGER <file name>
 ====================================================================
 call $PAGER as
 cat <data> | $PAGER            works                   works

 I do agree that the two use cases that you listed in a previous message
 exist, I'm not sure they were both supported in the case where $PAGER
 is a pipeline, but we can work on fixing that at least in
 sensible-pager by using systematically: cat "$@" | $PAGER

   Bye,

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
"You can gtk_main_run, but you can't gtk_widget_hide." --danw, 19-jul-04