bzr with bzr+ssh noisy and output muddled.

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 04:07:27PM +0200 I heard the voice of
David Ingamells, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> What I am saying is that STDERR was though up by some very great men
> in the history of Unix for an excellent - and still very valid -
> reason.

Cite your source for this claimed purpose being the sole intended
valid usage of it.  A name is not a source.


> The fact that one or 2 minor tools use it doesn't make it "very
> common". If svn or CVS did it you might have some basis for your
> argument, but monotone???  I have raised this here because I want
> bzr to be and remain mainstream, and by such lack of respect for the
> correct use for STDERR bzr risks losing the credibility it needs to
> remain mainstream.

OK, I'll bite.  What tools do YOU use for non-interactive downloads
over various protocols?  fetch?  Progress spinner on stderr.  wget?
Progress spinner on stderr.  curl?  Progress spinner on stderr.

What about ripping CD's?  cdparanoia?  Progress spinner on stderr.
cdda2wav?  Progress spinner on stderr.  Or encoding them to mp3?
lame?  Progress spinner on stderr.  Or maybe you prefer using flac?
Progress spinner on stderr.

These are just the examples that occur to me in the time it took to
write this email.  It's too bad all those above-listed tools have kept
themselves out of the mainstream from their lack of credibility, eh?

I've seen a whole lot of spinners, and while certainly not all of them
have gone to stderr, and I've never even asked the question about some
of them, I'd be surprised if less than a third of them did, and
totally unsurprised if well over half did.  Claiming this is some sort
of weird niche behavior is pretty ridiculous.


> Are you a soi-disant new-age thinker who knows better than those men
> who invented STDERR ( along with UNIX, C, ...)?

Depends.  Do YOU think that Thompson and Ritchie were avatars of the
gods, who made every choice perfectly?  Do you think the decisions
they made in 1970 should be accepted as eternal verities, and never
re-examined?  Are you aware of them leading a crusade against the
infidel defilers who dare to use stderr for something that isn't an
error message?



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.