brz 0.8.2 - Disable progress bar and enable it only on -v option

[Matthieu Moy]

jari.aalto at cante.net (Jari Aalto+mail.perl) writes:

> * Thu 2006-06-15 John Arbash Meinel <john AT arbash-meinel.com>
> * Message-Id: 4491CF87.7050406 AT arbash-meinel.com
>
> [progress bar on stderr]
>
> Argh, and how error messages are gathered from the stream? In Unix
> it has been very good idea to separate two things:
>
>     messages    to stdout
>     errors      to stderr
>
> The progress bar should go to stdout because it's regular message and
> not an error condition. Playing with the stderr/stdout to put "things
> nicely" is bad, bad design.

That's not correct. When you do

$ foo | bar

you expect "bar" to receive the information it is supposed to process.
bar doesn't want to see the progress information and informative
message which are meant for the user.

wget works like this, curl works like this, ...

If, for some reason, "bzr cat" started to show a progress-bar, would
you expect

$ bzr cat foo.txt -r 4 > foo.old.txt

to give you a progress bar in foo.old.txt ?

> I understand the need to show progress for non-experienced / win32
> people that may not have equivalent Unix background.

Does the fact that you have a great unix experience tell you what to
do when you run

$ bzr some-command

and get no output after 1 minute ?

> The road "always on by default" goes against the nature of the above
> flow, if this "progressbar" direction is taken as precedence of a
> design concept to more to follow.

If it's not on by default, 90% of people won't bother to learn how to
activate it, and will complain about bzr beign slow (the fact that you
see the progress gives a feeling of speed), and opaque.

-- 
Matthieu