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It’s hard work printing nothing

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Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#31

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ryandrake wrote: post #10
JonnieCache wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sho…

It makes launching Gtk+ apps from the console a major annoyance since you get the warning spam at random times while you may have been doing something more important. It would be nice if they'd just quiet up and add a verbose warnings option for the devs.

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#32

Post by akkartik »

kuschku wrote: post #30
akkartik wrote: post #2

I love the dry understated link to PHK's http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 there.

You should definitely post it as seperate story, I would have missed it if not for your comment.

Ok, submitted it and another of my favorite links on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#33

Post by panic »

cperciva wrote: post #29

There’s an argument to be made that silly error messages are better than crashing browsers There's an argument, but it's a really lousy one. If you're passing NULL as a string to printf, your code is broken . A crash which results in someone tracking down and fixing the bug is far better than quietly doing something which is 100% guaranteed to be wrong .

Yeah, and as browser developers have learned, process isolation is the right way to handle these errors anyway. A process crashing doesn't mean your browser has to crash.

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#34

Post by icebraining »

justinlardinois wrote: post #4
akkartik wrote: post #2

I 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 ar…

That's rich coming from PHK, whose software requires a full C compiler as a runtime dependency.

The reason Firefox pulls libtiff is simply because it uses a generic image manipulation library (libgdk-pixbuf), which in my system it's also used by many other applications - which do require TIFF support. I guess if you have a desktop with only FF installed that may be a waste, but how many people really have FF and not any kind of image viewer installed?

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#35

Post by hannob »

justinlardinois wrote: post #4
akkartik wrote: post #2

I 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 ar…

The firefox example is not true. Firefox can render tiffs inside PDFs.

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#36

Post by justinlardinois »

icebraining wrote: post #34
justinlardinois wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ar…

That's rich coming from PHK, whose software requires a full C compiler as a runtime dependency. The reason Firefox pulls libtiff is simply because it uses a generic image manipulation library (libgdk-pixbuf), which in my system it's also used by many other applications - which do require TIFF support. I guess if you have a desktop with only FF installed that may be a waste, but how many people really have FF and not…

> That's rich coming from PHK, whose software requires a full C compiler as a runtime dependency.

What software? And what does it use it for?

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#37

Post by smilekzs »

ensiferum wrote: post #28
zeveb wrote: post #5

The 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?

I think not a single actual application is completely well formed. They all work on luck. Especially in the embedded world. Btw, my android just rebooted.

"In the embedded world" covers a huge area, including mission-critical avionics code, which likely has much higher safety standard than, say, Android.

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#38

Post by icebraining »

justinlardinois wrote: post #36
icebraining wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rich coming from PHK, whose software requires a full C compiler as a runtime dependency. The reason Firefox pulls libtiff is simply because it uses a generic image manipulation library (libgdk-pixbuf), which in my system it's also used by many other applications - which do require TIFF support. I guess if you have a desktop with only FF installed that may be a waste, but how many people really have FF and not…

> That's rich coming from PHK, whose software requires a full C compiler as a runtime dependency. What software? And what does it use it for?

Varnish. It's in their FAQ: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/faq/general.html#why

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#39

Post by Cogito »

akkartik wrote: post #32
kuschku wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should definitely post it as seperate story, I would have missed it if not for your comment.

Ok, submitted it and another of my favorite links on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

For those coming later:

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12251323

Re: It’s hard work printing nothing

#40

Post by rhubarbquid »

bb88 wrote: post #14
ryandrake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sho…

It's a deprecation strategy. The warnings are typically for things that will break in the future. GTK can't control yet alone offer patches for the 1 million + programs that depend upon it as a library.

Printing those warnings to every end user isn't particularly useful though...
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