David Brown([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:51:19AM -0700: > On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 10:04:06AM -0700, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > > >It is a long-standing tradition that real computer users don't > >need warm fuzzy encouraging status messages. Programs that work > >just do so silently, saving their breath to complain if > >something went wrong. > > Which, as far as I can tell, is completely untrue. If something > doesn't print out anything, they wonder if it's broken or if > something went wrong. >
In the specific context of printing to STDOUT, I think this is common in older utilities. I wish it were more common. The convention of using the STD* file descriptors for their STD* purposes is a very good one. Need to spew other info? Open another descriptor and send it to the logger or someother file. > Linus just recently changed the status threshold on git to be > even shorter. The old behavior was the if something was taking > longer than 2 seconds, it would then start printing out progress. > That's now 1 second. Of course, git is divided up nicely between > the plumbing programs, which are usually called by other scripts, > and the porcelain which are not. Even then, the porcelains > usually have --quiet options. Tools that have "--quiet" options are better than ones that don't, but it still strikes me as a bandaid solution. If I wan't verbose output to STDERR, I'd rather ask for it and redirect, or do whatever else I want with a utility that follows the formerly widely respected conventions. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
