On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:46 PM, Oleg Finkelshteyn<[email protected]> wrote: > I've noticed the following behaviour which makes it somewhat difficult > to use -Qi/-Si/etc. in a pipeline: > > $ pacman -Si binutils > ... > Description : A set of programs to assemble and manipulate binary > and object files > $ pacman -Si binutils | cat > Description : A set of programs to assemble and manipulate binary and > object > files > > I'd expect pacman not word-wrapping the output in the second case, as > it breaks the line-oriented nature of data. > This happens because getcols() defaults to 80 when !isatty(1), but I'd > rather like it not to word-wrap at all in this case, as we're > outputting to something like a file or a pipe. In the former case, > some text processing tool could do better anyway, and the current > behavior makes the latter case hardly useful at all. > > Does that make sense? Basically I'm suggesting (maybe) getting rid of > the isatty() check in getcols() and adding one around word-wrapping > code in indentprint() and list_display(). An attempt at implementing > the proposal above can be found at > http://rain.ifmo.ru/~olegfink/pacman-wrap.patch (sorry for not > inlining, I use gmail). Maybe there should be more code shared between > the two routines, e.g. getcols() could return -1 when word wrapping > shouldn't be done. > > Any thoughts? >
I am fine with that patch. I would also be happy with "getcols() could return -1 when word wrapping shouldn't be done." Not sure which one is better. The latter would remove the need for any isatty call.
