Re: RFC: allow output from maintainer scripts

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Anthony Towns wrote:
> Using stdout is current practice and quite convenient, but apt frontends
> then can't distinguish between random prompty stuff, and these note things.
> 
> In the longer term, it may well interfere with the debconf worldview
> as well.
> 
> So I can't see any way of making this work with stdout and current
> practice.

So an alternative that has occurred to me is that we could introduce a
command like dpkg-log and require that all output goes through it.

dpkg-log "Recalibrating the frobnitzer"
dpkg-log --long "Bytecompiling for emacs20"
dpkg-log --longdone

Then dpkg-log could be replaced/coopted by these apt frontends you apeak
of, and by debconf, so their dpkg-log versions actually handle the
logging however they prefer to handle it. I'm not sure how things like
apt-frontends could temporarily make their version be used, so this
needs more thought.

-- 
see shy jo