Bas Zoetekouw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
