Re: RFC: allow output from maintainer scripts
Anthony Towns wrote:
> > > The sorts of information which currently get displayed, but which don't
> > > get prompted for, are things like "Restarting internet superserver:
> > > inetd", or "Updating /etc/network/interfaces: succeeded".
> > Or <40 lines of garbage ralating to byte-compiling obscure emacs modules>.
>
> Well, yes. "Bytecompiling emacs modules: emacs19 emacs20 xemacs20"
> would be useful output, by comparison.
Anything would be useful by comparison (and let's not even talk about
the packages that spew tex output to the screen and what users think
about that).
But consider: one of these emacs packages is installing and
it byte-compiles ok. Why should we display the message? Remember
staving off boredom is not an answer. On the other hand, if it fails, it
is going to be able to say "byte-compiling emacs20 modules failed:
<huge error dump of some kind here>", so what is the point of printing out
the message saying what it is doing as it compiles?
I take your earlier point about a daemon maybe hanging as it restarts, and
perhaps a emacs byte-compile can hang too. Heck, *anything* could
conceivably hang. If that happens though, there are tools like top and ps
and strace that are available to see if it has hung and help track down
what is hanging and why.
> > > To me, those sorts of outputs seem useful and helpful
> > Some of them, a lot are massively useless debug output.
>
> Yeah, sure. It's the some that I'm interested in though. :)
I still haven't seen any examples that seem genuinely worthwhile. If
some can be came up with, this becomes something I might be able to
agree with:
> So, how about something like:
>
> Packages should briefly report the main tasks as they undertake
may
> them, in a similar manner to that used in init scripts, but
> should avoid producing unnecessary or overly verbose output.
>
> If a package has a vitally important piece of information to pass to
> the user [...same paragraph, moved up a bit]
>
> Packages should try to minimize the amount of prompting [...]
--
see shy jo
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