zet

Git fails to recognize /usr/bin/pager

Yeah, just when I thought surely I was doing something wrong I discovered that the all-powerful, famous git program is totally broken on all major UNIX systems. People just don’t notice, until they try to do similar shit and actually read about the established conventions instead of doing what the Git team has apparently done: just make less the default.

Not only that, but this code from pager.c proves they are just blowing away the LESS and LC environment variables with their own, disrespecting anything the user might have added there:

   (void) term_columns();
   setenv("GIT_PAGER_IN_USE", "true", 1);
   /* spawn the pager */
   pager_argv[0] = pager;
   pager_process.use_shell = 1;
   pager_process.argv = pager_argv;
   pager_process.in = -1;
   if (!getenv("LESS") || !getenv("LV")) {
     static const char *env[3];
     int i = 0;
     if (!getenv("LESS"))
       env[i++] = "LESS=FRX";
     if (!getenv("LV"))
       env[i++] = "LV=-c";
     env[i] = NULL;
     pager_process.env = env;
   }

Suffice it to say, rather than get angry, I made sure Z.Page from Bonzai does the right thing:

// FixPagerEnv sets environment variables for
// different pagers to get them to support color ANSI escapes. FRX is
// added to LESS and LV is set to -c. (These are the same fixes used by
// the git diff command.)
func FixPagerEnv() {
	less := os.Getenv(`LESS`)
	if strings.Index(less, `R`) < 0 {
		less += `R`
	}
	if strings.Index(less, `F`) < 0 {
		less += `F`
	}
	if strings.Index(less, `X`) < 0 {
		less += `X`
	}
	os.Setenv(`LESS`, less)
	os.Setenv(`LV`, `-c`)
}

Yet another incident of fixing something in Go that was already broken in another language or app.

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