[Freemint-list] Handling of PRGs/APPs which console output

[Jo Even Skarstein]

On fr., 2017-01-06 at 18:14 +0100, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:
> On fr., 2017-01-06 at 23:16 +1000, Miro Kropáček wrote:
> >         Basically I think this approach is wrong. 
> > I think this concludes yours, Thorsten's, Helmut's and maybe someone
> > else's point of view. You think there's an excuse to virtually destroy
> > the user's display (yes, it's a rare case but all it takes is one
> 
> This is very easy to avoid. In addition to have an open console window
> which is the current solution, I volunteer to make two other
> solutions/workarounds that does not require any changes or additions to
> XaAES.
> 
> 1. A tiny program that simply opens /dev/xconout2 and doesn't care about
> it's output. This will effectively eat all output to stdout as long as
> this program runs. Autostart it from the auto-folder, xaaes.cnf or
> desktop.
> Then if you need to see debug output you must either start the program
> from a shell, or tell Teradesk that it's a TOS/TTP which will run it
> from TosWin2 (or whatever is installed as TOSRUN).
> 
> 2. A tiny program that takes the path/name to an executable as
> parameter. This program will redirect stdout to /dev/null, launch the
> program specified on it's commandline, restore stdout and exit. This
> will eat all output to stdout for this particular program.

I accidentally sent this prematurely...

> >  popular app which, for some reason, has output to stdout enabled and
> > its author refuses/not being able to remove it) while I (and perhaps

Let's be honest, we're talking about one particular program here :)
That's Netsurf, the debug build that's supposed to be shipped with the
Firebee. I'm not seeing any other user programs out there flooding the
screen with debug statements. Unless I'm helping someone debugging by
running a debug build of their software of course...

> > My point is mainly Linux and Windows world when any app can flood
> > stdout with thousands of debug lines and the user is happy using the
> > desktop as usual. And I don't see people jumping out of windows only
> > because they didn't see that precious debug output! ;)

Well, those operating systems has other ways of notifying the user. I'm
using both Ubuntu and Windows 10, and frequently see popups with
notifications from apps and the OS. MiNT/XaAES does not have such a
system. If you eat all output to stdout by default, you will never know
that Papyrus aborted due to lack of memory, you'll just see that it
vanished in front of you.

Jo Even