On 30 Mar 2022, Julian Foad wrote:
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.)
Good points, and +1 to prioritizing it lower down relative to
shipping the main thing!
