[Distutils] RE: autoconf in distutils

Blake Winton bwinton@tor.dhs.org
Tue, 20 Jul 1999 21:16:39 -0400 (EDT)


> On 20 July 1999, Anthony Pfrunder said:
> > 	* During install stage, people may want feedback or a "quiet"
> > 	  install.
> A middle ground would be nice, eg. just print "copying Python source",
> "compiling extensions", "installing", etc. but don't show the gory
> details.  This would be a sensible default.
> 
> Anyone have a nice way to implement multi-level verbosity this without
> making -v take a cryptic numeric "verbosity level"?  (Actually, the code
> has support for verbosity levels, but I'm not sure how best to expose
> this to the user on the command line.)  I've never been a big fan of
> either "--verbose=37" or "-vvvvv".

One idea I saw was a concept of classes of messages.
(I forget whether it was in the Linux /etc/syslog.conf, or NT's Event
 Viewer, but now that I think about it a little more, most compilers
 have a similar feature, where you can turn warnings on or off.  Well,
 it's similar if you think of the warnings as always happening, and what
 you're turning on and off is the reporting.)

So you could have "-v all" for every message, or "-v synopsis" for a
high-level overview.

It could also go two ways: either we could mandate specific classes, and
then the package makers could fit their messages into our classes, or we
could let everyone determine their own classes, which would result in a
little more work for the user, although we could let them know which
classes were available if we decided to set it up that way.  I think
either way could work, with a little forethought, and possibly some
input from the people who would be using the distutils.

Any thoughts?

Later,
Blake.