Notes...that flash by and are gone...

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 27, 2013, at 02:57, Jan Stary wrote:

> The solution I propose solves all af the above:
> just print all the install notes at the end of the port run,
> possibly followed by a line 'read the install notes above'.

I'd say there's no doubt this is a great idea; it's already filed in the issue tracker:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/24507

I actually rather like the idea of having a way (command line switch, or perhaps even by default one day) of having the "useless" MacPorts messages ("--->  Building foobar" etc.) greatly reduced to either one or zero lines per port. For example, overprint each line over the previous one so that only the most recent line is shown; let only the lines that don't start with "--->" be displayed normally. One could get even fancier and try to reduce the non-notes display to a progress bar; we have tickets about that too:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/15167
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/15939

But I also feel like the "port" command is a utility that MacPorts developers and experts users would use, while casual users who don't know about things like terminal scroll buffers could have a simplified client, possibly a GUI. By which I mean this problem of notes flying by and being hard to find needn't necessarily be solved by the "port" command itself.