"noisy" programs

[Mark P. Line]

On Wed, 12 Jan 1994, Darrell McCauley wrote:

> grass programs may be naturally verbose and have a -q (quiet) flag, or
> grass programs may be naturally terse and have a -v (verbose) flag.
> Which situation is preferred by users?

Verbosity is often disconcerting to experts. Quietude is often
disconcerting to novices. Since you can't have both default behaviors
simultaneously, I would suggest implementing an environment variable such
as DEF_QUIET which, when defined, causes all programs that care about it to be
QUIET by DEFault, unless verbosity is forced by -v on the command line. If
DEF_QUIET is undefined, then all programs that care about it would be
verbose by default, unless quietude is forced by -q on the command line. 

The default setting for DEF_QUIET itself should probably be "undefined",
since the users of a freshly installed GRASS will probably be novices more
often than not (or so one might safely assume).

-- Mark

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Mark P. Line                       Phone: +1-206-733-6040
Open Pathways                        Fax: +1-206-733-6040
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