Re: Patch: small reduction in output from make doc

[David Kastrup]

"Phil Holmes" <address@hidden> writes:

> TBH, I don't agree at all.  I personally think there's nothing worse
> than a process that takes place in the background and gives no
> indication that anything is happening.  I've frequently interrupted
> git grep for this reason - just to see if it's actually doing
> something.  My response would be - in Unix, if you don't want to see
> the "normal" output, then add a 1>/dev/null - it's simple enough.

Lilypond does not produce "normal" output, but mostly garbage.

And random garbage from an overly talkative program is not a progress
indicator since you can't actually rely on it.

Lilypond is commonly is called from a Makefile and other utilities,
obliterating all useful output from them.

The normal behavior for a Unix utility is to write to stderr when
something goes wrong and then bottom out with a non-zero exit status.
Make (or similar tools) stop, and the output on the screen is relevant
to what command was called last, what went wrong, and where the process
stopped.

That's relevant.  Highly so.

If you write things like 1>/dev/null or similar in the Makefile, you
don't get useful output when something goes wrong.

Mixing the important stuff with garbage means you either have to hunt
for the important stuff within the garbage, or you don't get the
important stuff at all.

-- 
David Kastrup