begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:19:07AM -0700: > > On Fri, March 28, 2008 9:56 am, David Brown wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 09:49:42AM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote: > > > >>But to remind everyone, cdparanoia was the original subject in this > >>thread, and cdparanoia is CLI ... a CLI program that defaults to putting > >>out smiley faces to stderr on success. > > > > As do an increasing number of CLI programs. The studies and human factors > > that cause people to need progress have nothing to do with CLI vs GUI, > > it's because the users are human. > > I have to admire you. I personally would not have the temerity to argue > that my personal preferences are superior to the thought-through defaults > of the founders of Unix.
I've told Ken Arnold that his pet project was wrongheaded, mostly on the basis of my personal preferences. And I consider him to be a huge brain, worthy of respect. So what? That just means I'll disrespect him *politely*. Appeals to authority, especially absent authority, just don't sit well. If they're an authority, they can argue with me, and if there's a good reason they're an authority, they'll probably convince me. > > You're in the minority, even among CLI users, for wanting slience. > > Absolutely. If I wanted to be in the majority, I'd use Windoze. This is where appeals to the majority or to popularity break down. We've already rejected that argument, yes? > > But, cdparanoia does exactly what we're saying it should, it has a --quiet > > option for scripting, but prints out progress in the default case. > > Default behavior is exactly what we're talking about. Y'know, I'm thinking about what I do, and my programs and scripts are all over the place on this one. It really depends on the envisioned use. But I don't think I've ever reserved stderr for just errors. If the program dumps its output to stdout, then EVERYTHING else goes to stderr: errors, warnings, status, progress updates... everything. As it should be, really. And do I worry about a program being "too chatty"? Not really. Generally, it starts quiet, and as I get bothered, or feel the need for a warm fuzzy, I start adding status messages, "you got here" notices, progress-dots, etc. Let the needs of the user drive the behavior. Now, checking to see if a file descriptor is a terminal...that's just evil and wrong. -- I get unhappy when what works interactively doesn't work in a script. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
