[RFC] report options

[jw schultz]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 10:32:12AM -0700, Wayne Davison wrote:
> Thanks for the reminder, jw -- I had meant to respond to this and forgot.

It had surprised me that there was no response.  This is just
way to invasive for a unilateral decision.  And frankly it
will be too much work to code up these patches without
expectation of acceptance.  Implementation details are one
thing but before i take this any further i want a consensus
on the general approach.  That is why i created the test
framework.

> I like the idea quite a bit since it allows the user to see what's going
> on to the exact degree that they need while remaining compatible with
> the old rsync behavior.  I just have a couple comments:
> 
> Rsync currently has 5 levels of verbosity (with the 5th level being
> reserved for a single debug message in the match.c source).  I'd want
> to ensure that the lower levels (how many?) match the old rsync behavior
> exactly for backward compatibility.  (I noticed that the current code
> has DBG_* options erroneously mixed into the RPT_* options in the
> RPT_VERBOSE2 level, so it would need a corresponding DBG_VERBOSE2 define
Oops.  Thanks.
> created.)  The higher verbosity levels have so much output that it is
> doubtful that people actually rely upon the output for script use, so we
> should be able to draw the line at (maybe) verbose level 2
> compatibility (though maybe even that isn't needed).

I'm inclined to draw the line just above level 2 with some
exceptions.

There would be some effort at matching the behaviour of
higher levels but since they are all debug and seldom used
the point there would be to attempt correlation with intent,
not precise matching.  I expect that if someone is working
on an area of code he will adjust the debugging levels and
even flags used based on more intimate knowledge.

> It seems like there should be a way to ask for all the RPT_* options to
> be turned on using the --report option as well as all the DBG_* options.
> I.e., if the user wanted to say something like --report=all, it would
> turn on all the RPT_* options, and if they say --report=all-debug they
> would get all the debug messages (at a default of level 1).

Trivial, but a good point.  I say trivial because, as you
could see from the code, support is built in for keywords
that affect multiple flags.


-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

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