On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 02:10:03PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
A few questions to pose to the list before I make changes that need to be made since I busted some things up with the last few updates of pacman output trying to make it simpler.
1. What information should go to stdout, and what information should go to stderr? I really should look at how it is done in the current 3.0 branch so I can get it right going forward in 3.1, but I want to make sure that what was done in 3.0 is right according to the list. I would think something like this: * non-essential info (progress meters and the like): stdout * list of packages to be upgraded, Y/n questions: this probably should go to stdout, but has gone to stderr in the past so that redirection of stdout works and users still see questions, and pacman doesn't seem to hang without reason. Thoughts? * "package is newer than...": stdout * errors/warnings: stderr
That looks fine. Redirecting the questions to stderr is a helpful hack indeed.
2. I introduced the pm_printf family of functions a while back but didn't switch much of the pacman output over to it. It mainly deals with not having to duplicate the use of "warning:" and "error:", etc in the code. Any reason not to use this as often as possible in the pacman code? I plan on doing this; I just want to first make sure I'm not making a stupid mistake. Obviously not everything will get switched (usage and help come to mind as being plain printf candidates), but I think just about everything else should go. My only thought holding me back is the fact that the error level codes are in libalpm and not the frontend, which may be a non-issue.
Wasn't the ultimate goal to remove all logging from the backend? Maybe starting to doing this in the frontend is a tiny step in that direction :) I am not sure though, I clearly don't know enough about this whole logging stuff.
3. I broke the newline stuff. If a progress bar is going and some output needs to be placed on the screen, it doesn't end up on the next line. I'd really like a clean way to fix this- the old global variable way seemed very weird to me, or at least it was too complex. I have one idea in my head, but haven't sat down and tried it yet.
You mean the following, right? : 42 static int neednl = 0; /* for cleaner message output */ 43 static int needpad = 0; /* pad blanks to terminal width */ I think I suggested a while ago to somehow make libalpm remember all the warning/error during extraction, for displaying them after the progress bar. But this might be even more complex than the padding stuff from 3.0.