* Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070509 10:15]:
> Users who have better things to do with their time than pore over boot
> messages, including me, don't care about boot-time output unless something
> fails; and if anything the current default verbosity of our boot scripts
> makes it *harder* to see failures through the noise. Changes that make it
> easier to distinguish, at a glance, between a fully successful boot and a
> boot failure are a *good thing*; they decrease the irrelevant data and
> increase the accessibility of information.
Changes that make it easier to destinguish are a good thing, while
changes making it harder to distinguish are a bad thing. And I think
the change in discussion makes it harder to distinguish, as humans
are better at coping with errors than humans are.
The main problem with all coloration and graphical output is that it
can only show problems anyone expected. The old Debian scripts output
was quite uniform and thus anything out of the row was easy to spot
and look what it is. Now some scripts tend to introduce colors and
one gets totaly disrupted looking at it. And there is nothing more
ridicule than seeing some large red "FAILED" after a message telling
everything succeded. Or some message indication critical failure
followed by a large green OK. (Which I almost always saw on every
colored output I looked at). When one even only see the messages
and status reports the scripts actually want one to see, one cannot
even see that the scripts failed to catch the actual results.
Perhaps it also depends what you consider your computer to be for you.
If it is a tool, then it should start as fast as possible and not waste
cycles showing me graphics, hiding information and thus makeing
impossible the only useful task while waiting for the machine up,
namely to take a look after the health of the machine and/or learning
what actually happens at startup.
And by the way, showing the user how many useless things start at
install time can only be a good indication for them to think about
deinstalling most of them. Hiding how many unneded daemons lurk around
only contributes to bloat.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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