On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 07:54:22PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > Bas Zoetekouw <bas@A-Es2.uu.nl> wrote: > >Hi Frederico! > > > >You wrote: > > > >> The program has 'less' harcoded into it, and uses it has a pager to > >> display the help, so I made the package depend on less... butt a better > >> aproach would be to change the code so it would get the PAGER env var > >> and go with it, in which case it would depend on a pager virtual package > >> (IIRC there is one)... but let's mimagine the user has a pager but > >> doesn't set the PAGER env? What is the Right Thing to do with this case? > >> Change, not change? > > > >It would indeed be very nice if the package would use the PAGER env var. > >It is probably even policy for it to do so. If the PAGER env var is not > >set, you should fall back to the `pager` alternative: /usr/bin/pager is > >a symlink to /etc/alternatives/pager, which is in turn a symlink to the > >default pager on the users system (the sysadmin can change this using > >the `update-alternatives' command). > > Have a look at policy 5.4. If it's too hard to make the package use > $PAGER directly, then just set the pager to be /usr/bin/sensible-pager, > which will make the decision for you. And this is all in the base > system, so you don't need any extra dependencies. > Oh, sorry about that, I suspected that this was mentioned somewhere in the docs... I am reading them, but there are a lot of docs to read and things to adapt since the packaging ones are realated to DH_COMPAT=1... I prolly passed by that point in policy without noticing. Well, if sensible-pager does all that then I will use it :) Changing the source code would not be very hard - even for me :) -, but using this solution sounds cleaner. > There is no pager virtual package - that's easy enough to find out by > looking at the Packages entries for 'less', 'most', etc., or by looking > in /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/virtual-package-names-list.text.gz. No > need to guess. Oh, I was at work, didn't have access to me Debian box. Right you are, there is no virtual package, but this alternative will work ok I think. Thank you, fsm -- Frederico S. Muñoz GNU http://www.gnu.org fsmunoz@sdf.lonestar.org Debian http://www.debian.org http://sdf.lonestar.org - SDF Public Access Unix Systems
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