Only two non-developers have responded to this. Barring a favourable response from other developers i'll shelve this proposal.
On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 08:11:09PM -0700, jw schultz wrote: > I have hinted in the past of wanting to go to a more > selective control of the output of rsync. Here it is. > > PROBLEMS with the existing --verbose et al. > > The simple incrementing verbose doesn't allow one to > restrict stdout to what actually is of interest. For > instance inside dirvish i don't care about directories, > or any kind of non-regular file because they show up every > time even if there is no change. Someone else might not > care to see reports of files that only had a permissions > change. > > When debugging, incrementing verbose levels turn on debug > messages for whole subsections that are of no concern. > > To work around limited control there is a continual push to > add new specialised verbosity options. --stats and > --progress are ones that got implemented. --apt is one that > didn't but was a not unreasonable feature. And recently we > evaded a request to bastardise --stats by linking it > into verbose. > > PROPOSED APPROACH > > Replace verbose with a bitmask and provide a clean, > extensible interface to set and test them. > > My first concern was that the command-line interface be > clean, intuitive and extensible. Evaluating the existing > options and streams i suggest the stdout controlled by > --verbose be called the report. Log refers to the logging > stream of rsyncd so it is already taken. I have modelled the > option somewhat on stty. > > One controls what is output with the --report option. The > option takes as a single argument (no whitespace) a comma > delimited lists of keywords. Some keywords can control > multiple flags so keywords may be proceeded by a minus sign. > For example, suppose you wanted to see a report of files > updated but didn't care about deletion. > "--report=file,-delete" would do the trick. Progress and > statistic reports would also be specifiable through this > option so "--report=file,dir,stats,progress" would be the > near equivalent of "-v --stats --progress". > > For backward compatability and because -v is intuitive the > existing options would be preserved and mapped into the > bitmasks. > > INTERNAL USAGE > > The use of verbose, do_stats and do_progress are replaced > with two bitmasks: report_flags and debug_flags. Two > bitmasks were chosen because debugging and verbosity should > be considered separate issues. To facilitate using these > two macros are created. Everywhere you have something like > "if (verbose)" or "if (verbose >= n)" It would be replaced > by something like "if (report(RPT_CREATE))" or "if (debug(1, > DBG_CSUM))". That is correct, each subsection of code would > have it's own debugging flag(s) and support up to > 4(cumulative) levels of debugging. > > EXAMPLE > > To facilitate discussion, as well as to do unit testing i > have created (attached) a simple example program. > It has a small number of examples of using the report and > debug macros which control the verbosity of it's output. > > The test program has very crude command-line parsing. It > recognizee -v, --verbose, --stats, --progress, --report and > --report=. It does not recognise -vv. > --report=help will list the normal keywords and > --report=dbg_help will list the debugging keywords. > > -- > ________________________________________________________________ > J.W. Schultz Pegasystems Technologies > email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Remember Cernan and Schmitt > -- > To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync > Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > -- ________________________________________________________________ J.W. Schultz Pegasystems Technologies email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remember Cernan and Schmitt -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
