Re: RFC: allow output from maintainer scripts

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "John" == John Goerzen <jgoerzen@progenylinux.com> writes:

    John> I think that works well.  It's better than requiring a
    John> separate command, and in fact, one can redirect output of
    John> commands to stderr anyway for those cases in which you might
    John> want to log the output of an external program.  Requiring
    John> dpkg-log prevents that.

IMHO using the dpkg-log helps structure the output of the task, and
what make it easier to have a more professional looking GUI front end.

eg such a program could have GUI fields for
- current package
- current task for this package, as generated by dpkg-log
- scroll-able list with STDERR and STDOUT output (eg to catch
shell scripting errors). This could be disabled if desired.
- this list could highlight more important events based on the
parameters based to dpkg-log.

Now, if dpkg used a similar method to report "directory not empty"
warnings, the GUI could even have an option that allows you to browse
the directory, and see if there really is anything important there.

Now, this E-Mail is going to open up a new can of worms ;-)
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>