Re: pager=1 as default? (Re: too many commands, "help" output rolls of screen)

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Sunday 02 November 2008 19:41:42 Robert Millan wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 06:07:30PM +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 01:46:10PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> > > > output will roll off the standard sized console. Please remove some
> > > > commands so there aren't so many that they roll off the screen.
> > >
> > > 'set pager=1' solves this.  Btw, should we make it the default?
> >
> > totally, this is very annoying by default. :)
>
> Since this was intentional, I'd like to know what others (specially the
> maintainers) think about this before proposing that it is changed...

The pager must not be enabled by default. This was decided in GRUB Legacy (by 
me), and I believe that this decision is still right.

The reason is that GRUB must not require any human intervention by default. 
Otherwise, if a command emits a lot of text for some reason, you have no 
control with a remote system. In reality, interactive usages of a boot loader 
are quite rare. So the default should be optimized for batch operations.

If you don't like this default, you only have to write "set pager=1" in 
grub.cfg.

Regards,
Okuji