Re: Some questions about packaging

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

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.

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.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]