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

[Jan Stary]

On Feb 26 16:56:23, jeremy at lavergne.gotdns.org wrote:
> > 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?

What? Whay would the user be closing a window where an installation
he started is running?

Of course, if that is the case, or even a restart,
then there will be no install messages either way;
that's not what we're talking about.

> If it alone was being killed by the user

(or anything)

> then we'd be flooding the screen with notes,

What "flooding"? We would display the install
messages of the package that got installed so far.

> when something (quite possibly displayed on the screen)
> made the user want to kill the command.

Fair point. But he can scroll back to that too, right?

Also, the majority (IMHO) of the port jobs, the typical run,
is just that stuff gets installed/updated and that's it.
So let's let the user have all the install messages in
one convenient place for_such_typical_run, and have him
scroll back _if_ there were errors. Right?

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

No, it's not ideal. That's my whole point.
Having to scroll back and actively search
for what packages wanted to tell me is not 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, it will _suffice_.
It will also suffice to write the logs and let the user read them
after every run, so why are we even printing the pkg messages?

> > 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).

The "problem" here is not scrolling (of course it takes nothing
to scroll up), but that the messages from the various packages
are dispersed all over the output and the user has to search
for them in the whole output.

The modification I am proposing is SOLELY to have them
at one place (namely, the bottom; where else).

> > 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.

What "pumelling the screen"?
Why are we printing the messages at all then?
If they are printed after each individual package,
there is not any less of them.