bzr with bzr+ssh noisy and output muddled.

[David Ingamells]

It seems that I've woken up quite some heated debate here, with many 
intelligent contributions. Once again the bzr community has shown that 
they are a cut above the norm for the internet :)

To complete the input from my side I'd like to remark that my 
"president's red telephone" observation applies only for unsolicited 
input. If the call is invited then of course it is allowed (e.g. "please 
give me progress reports"). I also sent long reply to bug 387717, which 
contains observations that others seem also to have made (often better 
than I did).

I tried using bzr with sending all stderr output to /dev/null, but that 
was no good because prompts asking for confirmation are also sent to 
stderr - as well, of course, as error messages.

 From my side I'd be fully satisfied with

1) fix the progress bar output to behave properly when it is used. It 
presently (1.1.5.1) isn't cleaned up when the action finishes. It also 
often isn't easy to see what it is saying. Probably time-related control 
too, so e.g. no display at all in the first 10 seconds and no updates 
within each subsequent 5 seconds.

2) provide properly working options to control the display of the 
progress bar. Not just environment variables, but also config file options.

3) only output to stderr according to the red telephone principle
       - unsolicited only when you have something essential to say 
(prompts for input, I'd say, are essential)
       - anything goes it if is invited by the user explicitly setting 
options to say they want it.