Re: [PATCH v2] help: colorize man pages

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> This seems very specific to use of "less" and hopefully does not do
> anything (bad) when a different pager is used by "man".
> 
>  - Would it help readers to somehow tell that color.man does not
>    apply at all to those whose "man" does not "less" in the
>    documentation?

Indeed it would. Done.

>  - What does it mean to set this variable to "always"?  For commands
>    that we control how the various pieces of output are colored (or
>    not), e.g.
> 
>    $ git -c color.ui=always log -1 -p >git-log-output.txt
> 
>    it is obvious what "always" means, but given the implementation
>    that tweaks how "less" should behave, a similar command (below)
>    would not colorize its output like the "git log" example above
>    does, would it?
> 
>    $ git -c color.man=always help -m git >git-help-text.txt
> 
> I am just wondering if we are better off not to mention "always" in
> the documentation patch above.  It seems more like that the
> configuration variable is to answer this question and nothing else:
> 
>     when 'git help' shows manual pages and internally uses 'less' as
>     its pager, do we tell it to colorize the output?
> 
> for which sensible answers are 'true' or 'false'.  For that matter,
> it is not clear what "auto" ought to mean, either.

True. The user most likely is not going to run 'git help $x > output'.

Initially I was making color.man a boolean, but stopped when I found
color.pager. Since Jeff said to use want_color() in the same way all the
other color.* configurations, I forgot, and used a colorbool.

I've returned back to a bool, and updated the documentation.

color.ui=auto is still respected (if stdout is a tty color is disabled),
but it doesn't really matter because less seems to be smart and disable
color anyway.

v3 sent.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras