[Pkg-mc-devel] Bug#581175: Bug#581175: redirect stderr of helpers

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 14:33 +0200, martin f krafft wrote:

> Yes, and suddenly I am forced to maintain Yet Another
> Extension-To-Viewer Mapping. 

Oh, I'm so sorry for dashing your hopes for salvation...

> I'd really rather not have to override the default config for this
>  trivial but far-reaching change.

Extension handling system thou would allow you to override individual
sections of mc.ext will come in later releases, right now there's no
other way around it, other than overriding the whole file.

> Fair enough, except /etc/mc/mc.ext uses /usr/bin/see in places,
> which *is* mailcap. Anyway, I am happy with the default. I just
> don't want stderr.

In places != in every place.

> The stuff printed to stderr gets spewed somewhere on the screen,
> most likely down where the command line is. It is not properly
> formatted, has no line breaks, and interferes badly with the
> shortcut bar printed at the very bottom of mc. Yes, it shows that
> there was something on stderr, but it's not very useful at all.

The fact that there's something on stderr is already useful to know for
me. Moreover, most of the times, although the output it garbled, it's
readable.

> Can you give me an example of when you don't expect stderr and need
> to react immediately to error messages?

I already gave you an example (numerical simulations of mine). 

Another one would be a script that creates an archive and spits out an
"out of space" error message. I'd rather like to see that something went
wrong here rather than just get a truncated archive after the source is
already deleted in the end.

> Shouldn't mc really provide a pane with stderr output instead, which
> is integrated with the interface, rather than to mess it up.

If you think so, feel free to open a ticket upstream.

> I don't think upstream provides a way for the user to configure this
> aspect. Upstream provides a way to specify extension handlers, but
> that's a core component of the software and cannot really be
> overridden.

Why wouldn't you read the man page yourself instead of asking me to do
it for you and summarize what I learned from it here? I think I already
gave you the pointer what to look for.

FYI I was wrong in the previous post about ~/.mc/mc.ext, in fact this
file should be called ~/.mc/bindings and you are supposed to go to Menu
-> Command -> Edit extension file to create your own copy of the global
configuration and open it in the mcedit to make your changes.
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev