APR is a general purpose library, and you have no idea what kind of application it is being used in. Perhaps it's not appropriate for there to be any output at all to the terminal? Perhaps there is no terminal at all? There's simply no way we can tell if it is or is not appropriate to send output to that file descriptor, so we must assume that we cannot.
I understand your point. In that case, the solution is to give a option
(pass a flag to apr_dso_load or something like that), but not to remove the
flag.
Well, if you feel so strongly about having the option (and it should be an option, turned off by default, IMO), then I suggest revising the patch such that it makes apr_dso_load take a flags parameter (changing the function interface may not be appropriate right now... perhaps an apr_dso_load_ex or something), and have one of the flags indicate that verbose error reporting should be used.
A thought : what if, we use some library API that does not give the option
of disabling the verbose flag ? What's the solution - not use that API at
all ? I don't think so.
Do any such APIs actually exist (and I mean where there is no other way to get the equivalent functionality)? Until one is before us, I'm not all that interested in debating theoretical questions.
-garrett
