GUI applications writing garbage to stdout/stderr

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 12:36:27AM +0200, Alexander Ploumistos wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 12:09 AM, Björn Persson <Bjorn at rombobjörn.se> wrote:
> 
> > Alexander Ploumistos wrote:
> > >On the other hand, if every message that was not meant for the user
> > >were suppressed, it would be very difficult to troubleshoot such a
> > >program, should an actual bug come along, because you would need a
> > >different build to get useful output in the console or a logging
> > >service.
> >
> > Nah, it takes only a command line parameter to turn on debug logging. An
> > environment variable could also be used. A different build isn't needed.
> > It's no harder to make logging conditional at run time than it is to
> > make it conditional at build time.
> >
> 
> The programs mentioned above do not have a debugging or verbosity flag,
> like e.g. "nmap -dd". The output can help pinpoint anything from minor
> aesthetic glitches, like a missing gtk theme, to crashes at startup. And
> that is a lot faster than querying the environment or running debuggers.
According to this logic, any program should spout maximum possible information,
because it might be useful. The reality is different — only some users debug
those issues some of the time. They can easily flip a switch or set an
environment variable when they want to use debug output. For the majority
of users useless output annoys and makes it harder to find relevant things
or use the tools from the command line.

Zbyszek