Dear Craig, dear Stéphane, accessibility is an important topic.
bug reports #813614 and #1059828 (the present one) can be fixed either by adding yet another feature to crontab, or by following the Unix way: make small excellent commands, each one in charge of a complementary action, and let them interact. In my opinion, Craig's proposition to use supercat is the right method to fix both bug reports; so, I propose to: - remove the file debian/patches/features/Coloring_the_ouput_of_crontab_l.patch, which will restore the previous (non colourised) output of `crontab -l` - modify the manpage crontab.1 to explain how to colourise the output of `crontab -l`; typically by issuing `crontab -l | spc -t crontab`, and explain shortly how one can customize at will the file which defines the coulourisation. - let the package cron install one file for supercat, /etc/supercat/spcrc-crontab; I attach such a file to this e-mail, so Stéphane can copy it as ".spcrc-crontab", in order to see how the output of `crontab -l | spc -t crontab` looks like. - add a recommendation from package cron to package supercat. Thank you in advance for your opinions about it. @Craig: if you are keen to provide an accessible version of the file spcrc-crontab, for example made only with high contrast, colourless, direct/reverse video, normal/bold variants, I would welcome your contribution and intergrate it, for example as file spcrc-crontabHC, so one can issue `crontab -l | spc -t crontabHC` to view a crontab with highly contrasted highlighted elements. Best regards, Georges. Craig Sanders a écrit : > Package: cron > Version: 3.0pl1-182 > > Please don't force colourised tty output by default. It makes the output > unreadable. > > Forcing one person's colour preferences on everyone is a vision impairment / > accessibility problem for everyone who doesn't have the same visual capability > as that one individual. Some of us have to very carefully adjust the colors > (and fonts and sizes etc) used by our terminals so we can read the text - > and it is very frustrating to have some program over-ride our settings just > because one person happens to like blue on yellow text, or prefers that > commented lines be highlighted. > > It's not even necessary for crontab to have special-case code just to > colourise comments - there are several tools for colourising program output > and other text, including colorize, highlight, supercat and others already > packaged for Debian. If some people want garish bling in their terminals, > they can use the tools that provide that. That's what they're for. > > At the very least, there should be a way to disable it. > > Or better yet, an option to *enable* colorised output (say, -c or > --colour/--color) for those who want it. Or an environment variable > e.g. 'CRONTAB_COLOR=Y' or (borrowing from GREP_COLOR and LS_COLORS etc) > CRONTAB_COLOR='43;34' to both enable and configure the colourisation. -- Georges KHAZNADAR et Jocelyne FOURNIER 22 rue des mouettes, 59240 Dunkerque France. Téléphone +33 (0)3 28 29 17 70
# ============ this file is to colorize crontabs ==========
# 1 2 3 4 5
#2345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
# HTML COLOR COL A N T STRING or REGULAR EXPRESSION
#################### ### # # # ############################
#Where:
# HTML COLOR - Standard HTML Color name for HTML output
# COL - Console color name from the list
# red, yel, cya, grn, mag, blk, whi, blu
# A - Attribute from the list
# ' ' : normal
# 'b' : bold
# 'u' : underline
# 'r' : reverse video
# 'k' : blink
# N - number of matches
# ' ' : all
# '0' : all
# '1' - '9' : number of matches
# T - type of matching to perform
# 'c' : characters
# 's' : string
# 'r' : regex - case sensitive
# 'R' : regex - case insensitive
# 't' : regex with Unix time conversion
# ' ' : default ('r' regex)
# 1 2 3 4 5
#2345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
# HTML COLOR COL A N T STRING or REGULAR EXPRESSION
#################### ### # # # ############################
# default is black
Black blk (.*)
# dom is blue + bold
Blue blu b 5 \s+(\S+)
# month is green + bold
Green grn b 4 \s+(\S+)
# dow is green + reverse video
Green grn r 3 \s+(\S+)
# hour is red + bold
Red red b 2 \s+(\S+)
# minute is red + reverse video
Red red r 1 \s*(\S+)
# comments are magenta
Magenta mag (^#.*)
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