svn commit: r337956 - in head: . bin/ls

[Kyle Evans]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 10:49 AM, Rodney W. Grimes
<freebsd at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 10:26 AM, Kyle Evans <kevans at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 10:24 AM, Rodney W. Grimes
>> > <freebsd at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>> >> [ Charset UTF-8 unsupported, converting... ]
>> >>> Author: kevans
>> >>> Date: Fri Aug 17 04:15:51 2018
>> >>> New Revision: 337956
>> >>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/337956
>> >>>
>> >>> Log:
>> >>>   ls(1): Add --color=when
>> >>>
>> >>>   --color may be set to one of: 'auto', 'always', and 'never'.
>> >>>
>> >>>   'auto' is the default behavior- output colors only if -G or COLORTERM are
>> >>
>> >> Why different than coreutils ls?   Default for coreutils is none.
>> >
>> > I guess this was worded poorly and you skipped both the review and
>> > reading the diff... this is still contingent on environment variables
>> > or -G being specified.
>> >
>> >>>   set, and only if stdout is a tty.
>> >>>
>> >>>   'always' is a new behavior- output colors always. termcap(5) will be
>> >>>   consulted unless TERM is unset or not a recognized terminal, in which case
>> >>>   ls(1) will fall back to explicitly outputting ANSI escape sequences.
>> >>>
>> >>>   'never' to turn off any environment variable and -G usage.
>> >> Why different than core utils?  Coreutils uses none.
>> >
>> > I guess this was worded poorly and you skipped both the review and
>> > reading the diff... this is still contingent on environment variables
>> > or -G being specified.
>> >
>>
>> ... copy-paste-o. The version of coreutils ls(1) that I have uses
>> 'never' for this. There is no valid 'none' value.
>
> Oh boy, we need to investiage that then, cause it seems
> as if the official page says none.   Does your say it
> has a different default value too?
>

For the record, the man page available on all of the Debian systems we
have claim to be "GNU coreutils 8.28" from October 2017 and includes
this verbiage:

[start]
...
--color[=WHEN]
    colorize the output; WHEN can be 'always' (default if omitted),
'auto', or 'never'; more info below

...

Using  color  to  distinguish  file  types is disabled both by default
and with --color=never.  With --color=auto, ls emits
color codes only when standard output is connected to a terminal.  The
LS_COLORS environment variable can change  the  set‐
tings.  Use the dircolors command to set it.

...
[end]

To join this thread back into one... I think the problem is that I've
worded things terrible, so you misunderstand. The default value is
--color=auto *if you've requested colors* (-G/environment), and
--color=never otherwise. Doing otherwise is, IMO, a POLA violation in
itself, because FreeBSD turns on colors with environment variables and
has for 18 years now.