I think it used to be the case that less could handle gzipped files transparently in Debian, but at some point that went away. Might be within the last release - might be a buster thing.

I haven't bothered trying to investigate it. Can anyone shed any light?

@FaheemMitha eval "$(lesspipe)"

I don't know if/when that was included somewhere by default

@MichaelHomer It's still in /bin/lesspipe. I should check if some of the others work.

I mean, it's there, but I don't know if the environment variables were ever set in the default environment

@MichaelHomer It requires environmental variables?

@MichaelHomer Oh, lesspipe is an environmental variable?

They're usually in caps.

What do you see if you run (exactly) lesspipe?

I am expecting it to output

    export LESSOPEN="| /usr/bin/lesspipe %s";
    export LESSCLOSE="/usr/bin/lesspipe %s %s";

or something to that effect

There you are then

Well, automatic decompression of gzipped files is still not working, though.

At some point maybe that was in /etc/environment or the default bashrc or something

It works by file extension so if they aren't named correctly it won't help

If I read a deb file using less, it works as expected.

If it's gzipped it has to have extension *.gz, *.z, *.dz

It works for me, but stretch not buster. I don't see why it would change in between though

@MichaelHomer Yes, the file I was just looking at is /usr/share/doc/gscan2pdf/changelog.gz.

@MichaelHomer I don't see why either.

But...

less /usr/share/doc/gscan2pdf/changelog.gz
"/usr/share/doc/gscan2pdf/changelog.gz" may be a binary file.  See it anyway?

zless works, of course. But I shouldn't have to use it.

Try strace and see what it's trying to do?

@MichaelHomer Ok.

Pretty strange that it works for .deb and not for .gz

This is unlikely, but could you not have gzip installed?

Trace isn't very informative. However, I just realised it's only root that is affected, so maybe the bash settings for root aren't correct.

@MichaelHomer It's installed. I'm not sure the system could function without it. dpkg, for example.

Don't see anything obviously wrong with root's settings, but obviously something is breaking.

I don't think any packages are gzipped any more

Well, does it have the eval somewhere that will run it?

It doesn't work with sudo anyway, also

@MichaelHomer Oh, have they dropped that completely?

@MichaelHomer eval "$(lesspipe)" returns nothing for root, so I suppose not.

@FaheemMitha It's not supposed to return anything, it just sets the environment variables

@FaheemMitha All the ones I see are data.tar.xz now

@MichaelHomer My mistake. I see that after I ran that, less ... .gz is now working. So that needs to be run, then?

@MichaelHomer Ok, maybe they completed a transition, then.

@FaheemMitha Yes, LESSOPEN needs to be set for less to filter the input

@MichaelHomer Ok.

Yes, I see I have:

export LESSOPEN="|/usr/bin/lesspipe %s"

In my ~/.bashrc.

Is a different syntax better?

I just added it to root's ~/.bashrc

The eval?

@MichaelHomer Are you saying eval "$(lesspipe)" is a better choice?

I presume so or it wouldn't exist

I can't imagine the commands really change all that often though

@MichaelHomer I wouldn't know. So that's more general/abstract? Less prone to breakage?

I imagine it will still work should the required environment variables ever change in a future version. But lesspipe >> ~/.bashrcwill save a process for every shell you start, which isn't nothing

@MichaelHomer That last sentence is a bit over my head. I'll just use eval "$(lesspipe)" then.

The eval runs lesspipe every time you start the shell. Just putting the exports into .bashrc doesn't. You can make your own trade-off decision about that or just decide it doesn't matter

@MichaelHomer Oh. Well, it probably doesn't matter.

If I just carry on using what I have, it will probably continue working, I guess?

And if it doesn't, I'll probably notice.

Weird link, via a LWN comment: ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

It looks like someone has been collecting acquisition and shutdown notices. But why?

And it's 2019, and someone is still complaining about how hard Debian is to install. Some things never change -> lwn.net/Articles/792952

Is non-free firmware support still such a problem?

Though apparently it was (eventually) a positive experience. To quote:

> Honestly, I'm stoked that a decade-old laptop that the vendor stopped caring about the second it was released has been given a new lease of life and feels like a modern machine again thanks to Debian.

Things that Python does not do well: subtraction.

In [11]: 10056.96 - 3300.00
Out[11]: 6756.959999999999

@FaheemMitha like any IEEE-754-based system: docs.python.org/3.7/tutorial/floatingpoint.html

The decimal module is better-suited here (without going as far as mpmath or NumPy):

>>> from decimal import *
>>> Decimal('10056.96') - Decimal(3300)
Decimal('6756.96')

There should be a badge "Legendary-adjacent" for earning more than 180 but less than 200 reputation

or, a Hollywood take, like "B-list Legend"

@JeffSchaller “also-ran” :-P

or the flip side: a "Legendary Investor" -- bounty 150 different answers with 200 points each

@JeffSchaller with its brother in arms, “accurate investor” — bounty 150 different answers, taking the answerer exactly to the cap but not over every time

(although since bonuses don’t count against the cap it’s a rather artificial goal)

“Legendary Investor” could be rephrased as “Creator of Legends”

"Legendary sniper" -- award a 200-point bounty to a user who previously had 149 rep-cap days

@JeffSchaller ah yes! And “Blind sniper” — award a 200-point bounty to a user who previously had 149 rep-cap days and whose profile didn’t indicate their “Legendary” progress

Fix-Jeff's-complaint: 7 days before the question is posted, calculate (200-rep) and assign a bounty of that amount -- hint: 50 would do -- so that the eventual answerer earns a rep-cap day

(bonus points for the time travelling, since bounties have to start 2 days after posting)

@JeffSchaller how many cap days do you have currently?

@StephenKitt somewhere between zero and not very many; is there an easy tally somewhere?

@JeffSchaller look at the bottom of unix.stackexchange.com/reputation

it will have something like

days represented 1548
rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 337 days
earned at least 200 reputation on 460 days
earned 12 reputation from suggested edits

but with smaller numbers (except perhaps the suggested edits) :-P

157 suggested edits until I hit 2k! I remember those days

ninja edit! :)

@StephenKitt SBCL does better. As does R.

you can edit chat messages without it showing up as an edit?

I knew when I walked in the door here that I wasn't going to be a big answerer

@FaheemMitha yes, they use arbitrary precision by default, rather than IEEE-754

@StephenKitt I think Common Lisp does. I don't know about R.

it looked like "but with smaller numbers" came in after I posted my rep list

@JeffSchaller ah, no...

I guess the question is - is IEEE-754 necessary?

@StephenKitt ahh, my old eyes missed in the tab-switching

@JeffSchaller you could have claimed it was a side-effect of event propagation in a distributed system ;-)

@StephenKitt it's always caching!

@FaheemMitha probably not, perhaps a PEP is in order

@StephenKitt I'm not so ambitious.

@FaheemMitha I didn’t mean to imply you should propose it ;-)

@StephenKitt Ok. Understood.

@JeffSchaller and can lead to amusing conversations

@StephenKitt :D

@StephenKitt Not normally.

@FaheemMitha I know, I thought Jeff’s comment referred to an edit he’d made (and I wondered if mods’ edits didn’t show up) — I think they do

Instead, it was just Jeff being mistaken about the timing of some comments :)

ahh good, all above-board

Yes, I think all edits show up with that little pencil icon.

Though these days, a little computer icon would really be more accurate.

@JeffSchaller the amusing thing is that when I clicked to edit that, after your edit, the text offered for editing only had my text, not yours

What's the last time anyone here held a pencil? For me, it's been a while. I think they still exist, though.

@FaheemMitha yesterday

also yesterday

trying to solve a geocaching logic-puzzle

Wow. I should get out more.

@JeffSchaller A what?

@FaheemMitha where'd I lose you?

@JeffSchaller "geocaching logic-puzzle"?

geocaching --> geocaching.com/help -- it's a bunch of kids and retired people using multi-million dollar satellites to find tupperware hidden in the woods

logic puzzle --> a way some people "hide" the final location of a geocache by making you solve a particular puzzle. Logic puzzle being one particular flavor. I wonder if there's a name for the category

Indeed there is:

A "Logic grid puzzle"

@JeffSchaller Interesting hobbies you have. What happened to passing out in front of the TV, in the time-honored American way?

/me remembers watching "Poltergeist" as a child and wondering what strange creatures those Americans were.

@FaheemMitha I don't need a TV to fall asleep :) You're talking to the guy that didn't have own a TV for many years

@JeffSchaller Oh. Do you own one now?

@FaheemMitha yes

@JeffSchaller Remember not to leave it on at night. Or ghosts might come out of it.

A very strange poem I think I was forced to "study" in school: bartleby.com/236/239.html

I'd forgotten about it till now. God as a stalker. Or something like that.

Uh, I missed that GNU Stow had updated to 2.3.0 for almost a month. And I'm supposed to be the port maintainer for that on OpenBSD... Ah well, patch submitted anyway.

@ilkkachu Saw your comment on your deleted answer. Yeah, I sometimes write a full answer to a half-read question only to realise I'm pulling the wrong strings completely.

Olleh

I'm using a separator for the Pandas function read_csv. It's sep='\s{3,}'.

I feel reasonably sure this is a regex, but I forgot to note what it means.

Can somebody tell me?

I guess no one here knows about Python Pandas (as of yet)

and to users who frequent this chatroom and will be affected by the new leader.

May Corbyn be a hope for UK.

@FaheemMitha If it's a PCRE, it means "3 or more space characters" where "space character" means any space, tab (horizontal and vertical), newline, or carriage return (the same as [[:space:]]).

... oh, and form feed.

Sorry for underestimation

Youtube keeps dragging me into politics. I need to spend more time on my own study

It is amazing how much I have been transformed from a politics ignorant since the beginning of this year.

:)