The behaviour of systemctl.

[Martin Dengler]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:54:38PM +0200, Aaron Sowry wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 10:03:05AM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
> > Your point about column headers is taken (explicitly, in my mail) and
> > bears no more repeating since there's a bug about it.
> 
> I didn't realise there was a bug for this, which is it?

You alluded to RH #713567 in [1], so I assumed that bug had this point
in it.  Re-reading it, it does.

> > Your point about paging continues to be that you don't like it for the
> > purist reason that unix-y tools shouldn't format their output.
> 
> This is not just purism for purism's sake.

You said tools paging their tty-destined output "irked the crap"[1]
out of you and didn't otherwise disagree that other tools do this (and
other things) based on tty-ness.  I'm not sure I was wrong to read
that as a purist's lament given the additional code is trivial in
length.

> I think the point is being lost here somewhere.
> [original paging-takes-code point]
> [new points objecting to paging]

The original point and new points you just applied to the irkesome
behaviour are simply not compelling: that 50+ lines of pager-related C
is somehow a fearsome vector for terrible bugs and must be excised or
that the year-old chosen defaults for a new command can be changed
with flags somehow impose a crippling learning curve.  Especially,
given (like I said) the precedents and utility of the defaults (which
you didn't argue with[2]).

> /Aaron

Martin

1. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152993.html

2. You said[3] you disputed the utility of paging-by-default, which is
   the behaviour I praised, and that I missed your dispute as to its
   utility in [1], but, no, actually, you gave no reasons why it
   wasn't useful in [1].  You just said it irked you, had a real
   danger of scary bugs, and had a bug when no pager was present,
   none of which are arguments for uselessness.

3. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152997.html

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