On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 01:44:59PM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > Carl Sorensen writes: > > >>> it should redirect non-error output to the file, and errors should appear > >>> in the terminal. > > Stdout is used for valuable program output, stderr for any kind of > message, including progress. The name stdERR is possibly somewhat > unfortunate and comes from the days that unix commands would only > print something (to stdERR) if there was an error. No news is > good news.
... I am *so* confused right now. > > I have no problem with putting progress messages on stdout, even though > > that's not the standard for GNU utilities. But I can see where David K. is > > coming from. > > Please, don't go there. I think we need to go here. I don't think we should make a formal GOP question for this (since that would delay it by a month or two), but let's get this sorted out. Questions for those involved: 1. what's the official unix definition of STDERR vs. STDOUT? 2. what do most users/programmers think that those names mean, and is it worth following an official definition if it simply leads to confusion? 3. do we believe in the general unix statement "no news is good news", in which case why does "lilypnond foo.ly" spam out 16 lines of text? (regardless of whether that spam happens on stderr or stdout or stdstrangequark) 4. we responded to a request from users to add more spam (i.e. "success: compilation successfully completed") a few months ago. There may be a "culture clash" between unix users and windows users. We can control this behavior with a flag (either -q --quiet, or -s --print-success), but which behavior should be the default? (I note that unix people are more likely to know how to add flags) 0. (meta-question) do we think that we can resolve this once and for all right now, or should we wait a month to cover it as a GOP-PROP ? If we discuss it now, then I do *not* want to have it left hanging (as we've done the last 3-4 times we discussed it). I want to have a definite decision; I personally don't care what that decision is. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
