[Flightgear-devel] Shut up, already!
Reading Eric Raymond's excellent new book, The Art of Unix Programming, reminded me of the importance of programs staying quiet unless (a) they have something critically important to say (i.e. help, I'm about to die), or (b) the caller explicit asks them to be noisy. Of all the programs I normally use, FlightGear is by an order of magnitude the worst offender against this rule. As a result, I've just checked in a few changes to start cutting down the noise: 1. The default log level is now FG_ALERT, or at least, it's supposed to be (though some FG_WARN messages inexplicably still get through). 2. I hunted down some cout/cerr and printf statements, and converted them to SG_LOG. 3. I lowered the priority of many FG_ALERT and FG_WARN logging statements. FG_WARN should be reserved for the program might crash or exit, and FG_ALERT should be reserved for the program is almost certainly going to crash or exit. FG_DEBUG and FG_INFO are more reasonable levels for other kinds of information, like I didn't find the 3D model I was looking for. 4. I put together a crude integration between FlightGear's SG_LOG facility and JSBSim's debug_lvl variable, so that JSBSim will also try to be quiet when FlightGear is trying to be quiet. I've forward-ported the changes to JSBSim CVS as well The ideal is for FlightGear to produce *no* (nada, rien, zero, naught, nichts, niente, nichevo) console output during a normal run -- if any text is displayed when the user did *not* request verbose output, then we should be able to assume that something is seriously wrong with FlightGear or the arguments provided by the user. Help will be appreciated. All the best, David ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shut up, already!
David Megginson wrote: I've just checked in a few changes to start cutting down the noise: No! But... but... if you do this, then no one will remember that the default type for a panel layer is texture, or that bindings are read during initialization. Just think what will happen when everyone forgets that their materials are already loaded! Seriously, bless you. :) 1. The default log level is now FG_ALERT, or at least, it's supposed to be (though some FG_WARN messages inexplicably still get through). What about the presumptively useful stuff like the JSBSim touchdown report or YASim solution data? Would it be a good idea to split out the stuff that we actually want to display to the user under normal conditions into a separate stream, rather than overloading the concept of error importance to do this? Or maybe the Right Thing is just to stick this stuff into the property tree and expose it via the GUI... Andy ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shut up, already!
Andy Ross wrote: 1. The default log level is now FG_ALERT, or at least, it's supposed to be (though some FG_WARN messages inexplicably still get through). What about the presumptively useful stuff like the JSBSim touchdown report or YASim solution data? Would it be a good idea to split out the stuff that we actually want to display to the user under normal conditions into a separate stream, rather than overloading the concept of error importance to do this? Yes, I'm concerned about this stuff as well -- people should not have to enable hundreds of lines of mundane logging just to see the touchdown report. Or maybe the Right Thing is just to stick this stuff into the property tree and expose it via the GUI... Or perhaps we could link it to a command (fdm-report) or something similar. In JSBSim, I think, it's a function that's called explicitly by JSBSim.cxx. Perhaps the other FDM's could add a reporting facility the same way. All the best, David ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shut up, already!
On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:49:58 -0500 David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andy Ross wrote: 1. The default log level is now FG_ALERT, or at least, it's supposed to be (though some FG_WARN messages inexplicably still get through). What about the presumptively useful stuff like the JSBSim touchdown report or YASim solution data? Would it be a good idea to split out the stuff that we actually want to display to the user under normal conditions into a separate stream, rather than overloading the concept of error importance to do this? Or perhaps we could link it to a command (fdm-report) or something similar. In JSBSim, I think, it's a function that's called explicitly by JSBSim.cxx. Perhaps the other FDM's could add a reporting facility the same way. First of all, yes, David M. I agree this was a good idea. It was something I recall I was supposed to have done a while back. The philosophy is one I agree with, but as a developer and with JSBSim in constant development, I'll probably set my environment variable here to always show the stuff, anyhow. As far as the takeoff/landing reports, this is something I've given some thought to for a while. You might know about the Message setup we have in JSBSim. We could probably work it so that instead of giving console output for the takeoff/landing reports (or anything else that is meant as a user-readable notification), we could instead send a text message to our FGInterface (in our case, FGJSBSim ??) and make that text available for the user. I expect they would hit Pause, and select a menu option: Performance Report, or Takeoff Report, etc. Jon ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shut up, already!
David Megginson wrote: Reading Eric Raymond's excellent new book, The Art of Unix Programming, reminded me of the importance of programs staying quiet unless (a) they have something critically important to say (i.e. help, I'm about to die), or (b) the caller explicit asks them to be noisy. Of all the programs I normally use, FlightGear is by an order of magnitude the worst offender against this rule. As a result, I've just checked in a few changes to start cutting down the noise: Excellent. I've had a few attempts in that direction but it looks like you've done it now. Erik ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
