Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: have portage be quiet by default

[Zac Medico]

On 11/13/2011 08:24 AM, Duncan wrote:
> The previous defaults made perfect sense to me already.  Parallel emerge
> jobs already puts portage in quiet mode, and that's what most people who
> care (see my point above about whether this is the right distro choice or
> not) should already be using.  That default makes sense, since otherwise
> the output would be jumbled anyway.
>
> 1-at-a-time merge defaults are therefore where the question is.  Two
> positions could be taken here.  If it is argued that those who care will
> already be using parallel mode in most cases, and that those who care but
> that can't be bothered to switch their defaults really should be
> questioning whether gentoo is an appropriate choice in the first place,
> then a "noisy" default for 1-at-a-time makes sense too, because the only
> time most (who care) will see it is when they're actually troubleshooting
> something and thus deliberately using 1-at-a-time mode, in which case the
> higher level of detail by default for that mode makes the the most sense.

Ever since I added --jobs support, I've felt that suppression of build
output would be a better default for at least the following reasons:

1) I estimate that the flooding of the terminal with build output is
useless for more than 99% of users. Usually, there's too much
information scrolling by at too high of a rate for it to be
intelligible. Having this as the default behavior is ridiculous and
leads to jokes like apt-gentoo [1]. Generally, people who want to
analyze build output are best served by PORT_LOGDIR.

2) With --quiet-build, the user is presented with a useful summary of
overall progress, along with current load average data. The output is
consistent regardless of whether or not the emerge --jobs option is used.

[1] http://chris-lamb.co.uk/2011/08/12/careful-what-you-wish-for/
-- 
Thanks,
Zac