It’s hard work printing nothing
tedunangst.com
It’s hard work printing nothing
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Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#2I love the dry understated link to PHK's http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 there.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#3[deleted]
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#4I love the dry understated link to PHK's http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 there.
> Here is one example of an ironic piece of waste: Sam Leffler's graphics/libtiff is one of the 122 packages on the road to www/firefox, yet the resulting Firefox browser does not render TIFF images. For reasons I have not tried to uncover, 10 of the 122 packages need Perl and seven need Python; one of them, devel/glib20, needs both languages for reasons I cannot even imagine.
This is a better read than the linked article, really.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#5The more I see of what goes on under the covers, the more surprised I am that anything works at all. As an example, every gtk+ program I run spews thousands of errors to the console. Why? Are they bad? The programs seem to run anyway, never crashing more than one would expect. So … why the console spam?
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#6The more I see of what goes on under the covers, the more surprised I am that anything works at all. As an example, every gtk+ program I run spews thousands of errors to the console. Why? Are they bad? The programs seem to run anyway, never crashing more than one would expect. So … why the console spam?
They're probably warnings rather than errors.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#7Semi relevant, I just spent the last two hours getting an ancient machine printing to modern copier.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#8Perhaps exception handlers should run inside a sandbox by default, because we know that exceptions are usually not well tested.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#9Semi relevant, I just spent the last two hours getting an ancient machine printing to modern copier.
I would love to hear the story if you have the inclination to go into details.
Re: It’s hard work printing nothing
#10The more I see of what goes on under the covers, the more surprised I am that anything works at all. As an example, every gtk+ program I run spews thousands of errors to the console. Why? Are they bad? The programs seem to run anyway, never crashing more than one would expect. So … why the console spam?
They're probably warnings rather than errors.
So? If they indicate a problem or potential problem, they should be fixed in the software. The fact that there is a "warning" message means that someone, somewhere thought it serious enough to write home about. If they don't indicate a potential problem, then why even print them?
Think about how you're supposed to treat compiler warnings: You don't ignore them--they are there for a reason. Quite the opposite--you should use your compiler to treat warnings as errors, enforcing good development practice from the start.
The grandparent's comment was about the surprise and concern you feel when you see all of these warnings yet things still evidently "work". When I sit down to a new project, pull down the latest code, start to work with it and see thousands of compile-time and run-time warning messages, the alarm bells start going off in my brain: This project is barely held together.