On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 11:10:03PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote: > On 3-Dec-2005, Frederik Eaton wrote: > > | Package: octave2.9 > | Version: 2.9.4-8 > | Severity: normal > | > | My version of Octave prints copyright/debugging information on stdout > | instead of stderr... It would be better to have it on stderr so that I > | can redirect just the output to a pipe or a file. > > I don't think this is a bug. > > If you don't want the startup message, then start Octave with -q.
There is a common misconception that stderr is just for error messages. In fact, it is for warning messages, debugging output, status messages, etc. Anything which isn't part of the specified output of a program. If someone writes a program in octave, they should be able to specify what the output should be and have this stay the same even when variables are being observed for debugging (by omitting a semicolon at the end of a line) or when octave's copyright information is not suppressed. If I should argue by precedent, the behavior of printing copyright and version on stdout is inconsistent with python, perl -d, mysql... Octave is not alone in its behavior, however: bc, gp, ghci, gdb print version information on stdout. But I think the former are "more authoritative" examples. By the way, why not have -q be the default when octave is run as part of a script? Frederik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
