Karl Fogel wrote: > I think printing these messages to stderr makes the most sense. > There are plenty of programs out there that parse the stdout of > 'svn'; we don't want to interfere with them. > > As you point out, it's especially important for 'svn diff' and > 'svn cat' that stdout remain untainted. Therefore, we can either > always print these messages to stderr (across all commands), or > not print them for 'svn diff' and 'svn cat' (but that would be an > odd inconsistency). > >> Anybody want to recommend what we should do for 'cat' and 'diff'? > > As per above: I think we should print the messages to stderr for > everything, including those two.
Printing progress notifications for data-output commands (diff, cat) to stderr does however invite bikeshedding. Currently in our test suite we assume any stderr output (from diff, cat) should be flagged as a test failure. We can change that, but it indicates that some users may consider it a failure too. We would need to agree and decide whether that's going to be unconditional or if the user needs to be able to turn it off for convenience and for backward compatibility. Because this could be dragged out I'm filing it as a lower priority for now. We can get back to it. (If someone feels able to resolve it, great.) - Julian
