Subject: Re: Debian 1.1 man & more

From: "N. Salwen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 14:34:39 EDT

Sorry for the confusion.  It turns out that more is not the same as less
on slackware but man automatically uses less without a variable set.  I'm pretty sure it is not using a temp file. 

Is there any reason the default PAGER on Debian should not be set to less
out of the box?

Nathan

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From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 13:43:06 -0500 (CDT)

> Is there any reason the default PAGER on Debian should not be set to less

less is not a base package, so might not be installed.  more is one
third the size of less, and it's very important to keep the base
packages as small as possible.

Guy

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From: Richard Lovison <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 18:15:07 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Amos Shapira wrote:
 
> I never went all the way about this, but I allways had the suspicion that
> Slackware's "more" is actually "less" renamed.  Could you check this?
> (maybe try "more -V"?)
> 
I dug up my old Slackware 2.0.1 distribution on cdrom and discovered that
the /usr/lib/man.config file defined the Pager as less with the `s'
option.  I was in error, sorry about that, I thought more was used.  My
provider running System V Release 4 does use more as the man pager and
writes out a temp file /tmp/mpa... for more.---Richard

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From: Ben McKeegan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 09:51:10 +0100 (BST)

> packages as small as possible.

Couldn't the default scripts check if less is present and set PAGER 
acordingly?

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben McKeegan                                              CST 1a
Fitzwilliam College,
University of Cambridge.