Hi Eelco, >> There is a very good reason for this principle. If a program does >> more than what it's intended to do, then it hurts composability. > > There shouldn't be an issue with composability here, because Nix will > only run the pager when stdout is a terminal. So things work fine if > you pipe Nix into another command.
Let me give you an example where this assumption fails: Listing the current generations from your shell profile. In fact something very similar happened to me, which motivated me to start this thread: The change broke my assumption that Nix can be used safely from a shell script. Nothing bad happened, but one day was wasted, because a script stopped for `less` without my knowledge. I really believe that projects should start as non-interactive script- and command-line-friendly programs /by default/. I'd go as far as to call this a good design principle. Frontends can always be made. Greets, Ertugrul _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
