Notes...that flash by and are gone...(was Re: any good audio/video editing apps in macports?)

[Jeremy Lavergne]

> Surely the install process does some maintenance at its exit
> (read: catches signals), and can spit out those messages even
> if it is exiting due to being interrupted (as opposed to
> finishing without error).

If MacPorts is quitting because the user is closing the window mid-process or the computer is rebooting, what difference will any messages make?

If it alone was being killed by the user then we'd be flooding the screen with notes, when something (quite possibly displayed on the screen) made the user want to kill the command.

A simple "notes happened above" message would be ideal.

>> Conversely, we'd be spewing twice as many messages
>> if the install isn't interrupted.
> 
> Why? If the messages were _only_ printed at the end?

Why move where we're printing them when a simple "hey, scroll up" will suffice?

> Yes, the user can scroll up and look for those messages.
> This inconvenience (not that serious of course) is my
> whole point here: that the user has to scrool and look
> for it.

If there are more than 24 lines of notes, the user is already scrolling up. A simple message alerting you to the need to scroll up address the real concern (not knowing anything happened until after having scroll up--now you know before scrolling).

> Isn't it trivial to cat all the install messages to a file,
> and cat that file upon exit (succesful or not)?
> 
>> This avoids duplicate notes
> 
> What duplicate notes?

I was thinking we couldn't print notes solely at the end as we'd be pummeling the screen when the program exits.