Bug#341906: [Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#341906: octave prints copyright/debugging information on stdout instead of stderr

[Frederik Eaton]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 11:10:03PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On  3-Dec-2005, Frederik Eaton wrote:
> 
> | Package: octave2.9
> | Version: 2.9.4-8
> | Severity: normal
> | 
> | My version of Octave prints copyright/debugging information on stdout
> | instead of stderr... It would be better to have it on stderr so that I
> | can redirect just the output to a pipe or a file.
> 
> I don't think this is a bug.
> 
> If you don't want the startup message, then start Octave with -q.

There is a common misconception that stderr is just for error
messages. In fact, it is for warning messages, debugging output,
status messages, etc. Anything which isn't part of the specified
output of a program. If someone writes a program in octave, they
should be able to specify what the output should be and have this stay
the same even when variables are being observed for debugging (by
omitting a semicolon at the end of a line) or when octave's copyright
information is not suppressed.

If I should argue by precedent, the behavior of printing copyright and
version on stdout is inconsistent with python, perl -d, mysql... 
Octave is not alone in its behavior, however: bc, gp, ghci, gdb print
version information on stdout. But I think the former are "more
authoritative" examples.

By the way, why not have -q be the default when octave is run as part
of a script?

Frederik