This is a copy of the suggestion I made in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2015-01/msg00001.html Karl Berry suggested I ask for your views first.
Various programs (including gcc and bison) support caret error messages, and recent versions have it activated by default. Caret output is a useful feature in many cases, but sometimes it's not helpful. E.g. when your editor parses the line/column numbers from the output and automatically jumps to this position, additional caret output is not needed, and indeed rather wastes space in the list of output messages. For other users, caret output just wastes screen-space, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19341149/turning-off-error-message-caret-in-gcc-4-8 Sure, you can turn off carets with command-line options such as "-fno-diagnostics-show-caret" (gcc) or "-fno-caret" (bison). But before you do that, you need a version check, since older versions don't understand these options and would fail. Also, the options differ between tools as shown for gcc and bison. At some time, the next tool, perhaps flex, will get carets and you need yet another option and version check, etc. ... Now, suppose your build runs from a Makefile (which contains various gcc, bison, etc. invocations), and you want to use the Makefile from an arbitrary context (e.g. plain command line where you want carets, and from the editor where you don't). Now, you have to pass some variable to the Makefile to tell it whether to do those version checks and pass the respective options to gcc, bison, etc. And you need to do this in every relevant Makefile. This all gets a bit cumbersome ... So let me suggest an alternative: If all programs that support caret output would recognize a common environment variable (say "NO_CARET_OUTPUT"), all of the above complications would disappear: - No version checks are required, since older versions simple ignore the variable. - One doesn't even have to know which programs (gcc, bison, maybe flex etc.) support carets if they use a common variable. - The Makefiles don't have do to anything since environment variables are automatically propagated. Only the editor, i.e. the instance that actually knows that carets are not useful there, needs to set the variable once. (So not only DRY, but also SOC, to drop some TLAs. ;) Does this seem reasonable? Regards, Frank
