Bug#722457: Make (stderr) output more readable

[myon@debian.org (Christoph Berg)]

Package: autopkgtest
Version: 2.3.2
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

it would be nice if autopkgtest would make the test output more
readable. There's two things I'd want:

* Do not split stderr and stdout - errors are often meaningless if
  they are not shown with their normal stdout context

  This could be achieved by printing stdout and stderr to the same
  buffer, while still erroring out on any stderr output. Possibly
  stderr lines could be prefixed by "E:" (and stdout maybe by "   " so
  there's some alignment).

  autopkgtest could then still print out a "there was stderr content:
  ..." section at the end of the test.

  Oh, and please don't clip stderr to such a short prefix as it is
  done now - paths in build environments are often very long.

* Please print the output while the tests are running so the user can
  watch it

  The workaround to tail -f some file in /tmp is arkward, and doesn't
  work at all when running in Jenkins.

  This would even go along very well with the first item here not to
  print stdout/err separately.

Christoph
-- 
cb at df7cb.de | http://www.df7cb.de/
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