display-buffer annoyance

[K. Richard Pixley]

Ordinarily, things that use display-buffer and friends, (eg, the C-x 4 
commands), split my window vertically.

If my window is very wide, they split it horizontally.  While I 
appreciate that this is completely reasonable default behavior, I find 
it annoying and would prefer that M-x compile, M-x debug, M-x grep, and 
friends would always split horizontally.

Is there a configuration for this?  (The only one I find is 
pop-up-frames which isn't quite what I want.)

--rich