Re: automake: tap-driver.sh: cleanup and revival.

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017, Warren Young wrote:

> On Oct 25, 2017, at 8:56 AM, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > It's also crazy that "--color-tests=y" or "--color-tests=1" won't work
> >
> > While I like color in photos and nature, automatic colorization of 
> > output often causes problems for me since it often renders the text 
> > unreadable.
>
> Why, exactly?

There are always assumptions about the terminal colors.  It is often 
assumed that the terminal background is black but I use a light color 
background.  Bright greens and cyans are virtually illegible for me.

Not all displays behave the same so what looks good one one display 
may be illegible on another.

> I ask because the default color scheme of some terminal emulators 
> makes the dark blue on black text difficult for me to read, but 
> that’s easily fixed by switching the color scheme.

Switching the color scheme takes valuable time.  When one visits many 
different remote systems using various client systems, it is a losing 
proposition to attempt to customize colors.

> Well-behaved programs (e.g. GNU ls --color=auto, colordiff…) 
> suppress color output when stdout is not a terminal.  They do that 
> by making calls like isatty(3) if written in C or test(1) -t if 
> written in shell.

I sometimes make a typescript using 'script' and in this case colors 
will be output.  Other times I use 'tee' to capture output while still 
seeing what is going on.

> As for the portability of ANSI terminal escape codes, it’s still 
> best to delegate such things to curses or libraries like it, despite 
> the near ubiquity of ANSI-family terminal emulators.

Agreed.  Yet, a mismatch wastes time.  I would rather use something 
which works 100% of the time and looks less pretty than something 
which works 80% of the time but can be made to look immaculate.

Defaulting to being usable 100% of the time works for me. :-)

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/