GUI applications writing garbage to stdout/stderr

[Kevin Kofler]

Björn Persson wrote:
> Except when they have really serious errors.
> 
> I once had an X problem that prevented Openoffice from working. It
> showed no window, output nothing, and terminated immediately with an
> exit code of zero. In other words it behaved just like the command
> "true". That's going a bit too far.
> 
> (I wrote a bug report and was told that Openoffice was fixed to write
> an error message and return an error code.)

You're right, fatal errors are pretty much the one case where it makes sense 
to complain to stderr, at least if they're so bad that you can't even bring 
up an error dialog.

        Kevin Kofler