bzr with bzr+ssh noisy and output muddled.

[Martin Pool]

Yes, there are bugs open about having a way to disable the progress
bars and to have them properly synchronized with other output.
They're assigned to me and I'll try to fix them soon.

If people don't like this going to stderr what do they want?

0 - Bugs regarding it cluttering other output fixed? ok, of course.
1 - An option to just turn it off?  ok, that too should be fixed.
2 - The progress bar sent to stdout?  That seems even worse, because
stdout is fairly often, even for commands that show progress, going to
be eg a patch or a log you want to redirect into another file.
3 - The progress sent to /dev/tty?  That would be different to stderr,
and it would be different for cases like this:

  bzr log >log.out 2>log.err

- you would still get the progress bar on the tty and just the
warnings or errors in log.err.  It may be useful.

At the moment we only show progress if stderr isatty, so this command
at present would give you just the errors in log.err but no progress
at all.

Using /dev/tty may make things a bit harder to test or to script.  Are
there other problems?

Is this behaviour actually what you want?  Arguments about whether
ttys are meant to be teletypewriters or core files are meant to come
from magnetic cores are very amusing I'm sure, but not very helpful in
working out what behaviour is actually best.

If you just want the already filed bugs fixed so do I, but stderr vs
others is a distraction.

> Seriously, what we need is a way to deactivate progress report[0]
> for people that don't want it, which as far as this list is a
> representative set of our users, is a minority (which includes me
> hence: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/387717/comments/3;).
>
> As for a progress reporter able to talk only when requested via
> SIGUSR1... patches welcome[1] ! <wink>

What should it do?  I seem to recall that BSD tar(?) will write just
one line of output to stderr when this is sent.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>