Hello, I've been wanting to discuss the default behaviour of systemctl, which I began doing on fedora-devel (see [1] for start of thread) before it was pointed out that systemd-devel is probably a more appropriate place for discussion.
For those who can't be bothered reading through the original thread, I'll try to summarise: systemctl implements a lot of default behaviours which differ depending on whether the output is tty or not. These include: - Automatically forking a pager and piping output to it if the output is tty. This results in a number of problems, including RH #713707 which means that the user will get no output on tty if there is no supported pager available. --no-pager has been provided to disable this, and $SYSTEMD_PAGER is being considered[2] as a workaround for non-supported pagers. - Column headers will be displayed on tty, but not otherwise. The assumption here seems to be that output to non-tty channels is not destined for human eyes. Currently, there is no way to force column headers on non-tty channels. - It has been suggested[3] that --full is implicit when outputting to non-tty channels, however I am unable to reproduce this behaviour on Fedora 15. Assuming that this will be the default behaviour though, we have a similar problem to the point above, since there is currently no way to disable --full on non-tty channels. As far as I see it, then, we have two options: 1) Continue providing workarounds such as $SYSTEMD_PAGER (and possibly something like --no-full and --force-headers) to mitigate behaviour imposed on users by developers; or 2) Stop making assumptions about what users want, and simply send output to stdout in all cases unless the user specifies otherwise. In case it wasn't obvious, I am in favour of 2). Thanks. Aaron [1] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152993.html [2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38439 [3] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/153037.html
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