[GRASS-dev] r.mapcalc and g.remove --v/q issues

[Paul Kelly]

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Hamish wrote:

> I think it is wrong to make all modules --quiet be default. Many years
> of tuning have gone into the current message level, we just throw that
> out? Sure some modules are very noisy and that should be dealt with
> (remove useless noise and move debug info to G_debug()).
>
> IMO the "only create output if something interesting happens"
> guideline should only apply to UNIX-like small "do one thing well"
> modules. Quick little modules used in a script (ie in a loop) can be
> made a bit quieter, sure.
>
> But for long running modules like v.surf.rst and r.sun, we should
> definitely let the user know what's going on, what mode the module is
> running in, how many points used for processing, etc. Anything which is
> expected to take longer than about 10 seconds under normal conditions
> should at least give G_percent() output IMO.
>
> This is especially important for new users who are not confident or
> knowledgeable about what is going on or how long it will take.
>
> Hiding all G_message() and G_percent() output *by default* is totally
> nuts. Adding --quiet or GRASS_VERBOSE=0 isn't hard if you are writing a
> script or GUI frontend.

I agree with all this - it's what I was trying to say when Jachym first 
proposed this and I suggested a --quiet flag would be better to have than 
--verbose (i.e. keep the current output as default but allow frontends 
that need to run modules in quiet to achieve that), but I couldn't find 
the words to express myself very well and so gave up replying to the 
thread :/ I'm surprised more people didn't object at the time; FWIW it's 
worth I just have trouble with the idea of treating GRASS modules as 
normal Unix programs that only emit output when there's an error.

Paul