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Re: colorls in base



On 2/15/19 10:45 PM, maya%netbsd.org@localhost wrote:
Consider the problem of compilers emitting messages for bad code. You'll
have like 3 warnings and 2 errors, and possibly 2 page fulls of
messages.

You want to improve things, make it faster to find the problem, so you
would like the error to be more noticeable than the warning.

Some things you can do:
- Indentation, sacrificing vertical space which might be a scarce
   resources.
- uppercase, maybe? this isn't very noticeable, and if anyone has
   scripts to search, you'll probably break them.
- Emit less information by default. This might be a problem if changing
   compilation flags isn't trivial, or the failure takes long to reach,
   or the failure is reached by a user, then you must communicate "please
   run this again but wth EMIT_ALL_THE_INFORMATION_I_NEED=yes"

Or you can:
- Get the best of all worlds, not have to change anything, and emit the
   word "error:' in another color for interactive users.


Sorry, but that's a non-argument to me. I got by with compiler errors for many years by just running "cc ... files.c 2>&1 | less" and looking at the first few errors. To distinguish between warnings, search for "error:"  when needed. And the first errors are typically the important ones.

Colorized output just irritates me.

regards,
chris



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