When I was writing some scripts to test the performance of
skip-deltas, I noted that the treatment of the "-q" option seemed a
little odd to me. "svn ci -q" would omit the file statuses but would
still print "\nCommitted revision N.\n"; and the -q option didn't
apply at all to "svn update" or "svn add".
Now that I'm coming back to this, I'm a little unsure about what the
right behavior is. If we review how the -q option works in other
commands, we see two different classes of behaviors:
* "Silence is golden": In some cases, like rsync or scp, the -q
switch is equivalent to redirecting stdout to /dev/null. The idea
is to turn a noisy command into something more like a traditional
Unix utility, which never writes anything to stdout unless that's
its primary function.
* "Speak softly": In other cases, like cvs, the -q switch reduces
chatter but leaves some informational messages alone. In the cvs
case, per-directory messages go away but the file status messages
stay.
Since we don't have per-directory scanning messages in svn (and I'm
guessing we don't want them, at least not without a -v option), I'm
guessing the "speak softly" model would omit file status messages but
would retain messages about revision numbers:
% svn -q co URL wc
Checked out revision 1001.
% cd wc
% svn -q update
At revision 1003.
% touch newfile
% svn -q add newfile
% svn -q mv somefile someotherfile
% svn -q ci -m "Some log message"
Committed revision 1004.
("svn -q ls" or "svn -q st" would be errors; "ls --quiet" makes no
sense and neither does "svn ls --quiet".)
I'd like to implement one of the models, but I'm not sure which. I'm
guessing there isn't much to say on this topic beyond what I've
already said, so we can probably take it immediately to a vote on
preference.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Thu Aug 1 14:58:34 2002