On Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:44:59 +0800 Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 7:09 AM, Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> > wrote: > > > It's not clutter. If you don't want to see it, run the command and > > redirect stderr. > > debug output should certainly not be output by default in released > versions without a command-line or configuration option turning it on. On the contrary, I've outlined some situations where on-by-default is the best way to identify the bug itself. > l for one don't want ls doing something like this: > > ls: starting up > ls: checking for bad filesystems > ls: searching for files in /home/foo/some/path > foo bar/ baz/ > ls: 1 file found > ls: 2 directories found But if that software starts misbehaving in circumstances which are not easily identified, then debug output can be essential. If the above is actually: stderr> ls: starting up stderr> ls: checking for bad filesystems stderr> ls: searching for files in /home/foo/some/path stdout> foo bar/ baz/ stderr> ls: 1 file found stderr> ls: 2 directories found then this could be useful. Done correctly, (and the above wouldn't be nice from something like 'ls' but for other command line programs it could be necessary), debug-on-by-default is very important to actually debugging hard-to-reproduce bugs. Even coreutils has bugs. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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