Re: Patch: small reduction in output from make doc

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 04:48:36PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Actually, I feel progress messages belong on /dev/null.  Iff stderr is
>> on a tty, there may be some justification to put out some progress
>> indicators to it, but they should not take useful space: one can
>> compress successive progress messages by using CR and/or BS when going
>> on.
>
> How would that play with (presumably poor) terminal support on
> mingw,

No idea.

> and even worse, various "graphical" apps like lilypad, jedit,
> frescobaldi, etc?  I like that idea for normal linux usage, but I
> don't think we should switch to that system without knowing how it
> would affect other programs which call lilypond.

Every change may affect other programs.  One would not be able to
improve anything if that was a concern.  And such shells are quite
unlikely to run Lilypond on pseudottys rather than just ordinary pipes.
And an application using pseudottys and not being able to cope with CR
and BS is just broken, anyway.

> (I'm not saying that we absolutely should not break those programs --
> if they do something weird, and we're certain that the new method is
> superior, then I'm totally fine with breaking stuff.  But we need much
> more information about what kind of breaking might occur before we can
> make an informed decision.)

There is something to be said for not changing things willy-nilly around
every release.  But it's the job of shell maintainers to adapt to
improvements, and it is sane in that context not to go down in flames if
unexpected things happen.

-- 
David Kastrup