[texdoc] diagnostics

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi Karl,

Karl Berry a écrit :
> Regarding the problem of no displays, it seems rather pervasive.
> gnome-open doesn't give any self-identification either.  evince gives a
> clue, at least.
> 
Too bad. Maybe I should check if DISPLAY is set before trying to display
anything on Unix? Then I could issue a warning message before trying to lauch
the viewer. (And/or default to list mode.)

> Question 1) why is it choosing evince instead of xdvi?  I'm not
> running any window system at all, it's a remote ssh.
> 
Because evince is in the PATH. If it cannot detect a know desktop environment
(Gnome, KDE, XFCE) texdoc sequentially checks for known viewers in the PATH and
picks the first one found. evince happens to come before xdvi in this list. I
think the idea behind that was that xdvi is installed by default, but not
evince, so if evince is installed, it is likely to be a conscious choice, so
maybe it means the users prefers it...

> Same non-output.  2) So what does -v1 do? 
> 
> 3) Also, is there any possibility of making the argument to -v be optional?
> It is nearly unprecedented to be *forced* to give a verbosity level,
> instead of having -v be a default.
> 
> 4) Also, the standard long option name is --verbose, not --verbosity.
> 
I guess I should rework this whole verbosity stuff. How about the following:

-v, --verbose	Be more verbose.
-q, --quiet	Be less verbose.

-v could not be repeated, and would display the viewer command before launching
it, and maybe a few other informations.

-q would suppress warnings, -q -q would suppress even errors (except internal
errors, since I'm not sure how to suppress them). (And of course one would like
to be able to say -qq rather than -q -q but that's another problem.)

> Ok, so I try -d.  Now I get much too *much* output.  Tens of thousands
> of lines (before I stopped it) about processing every potential
> directory and every potential file.  This is not helpful to anyone who
> just wants to get some clues about why the doc was not displaying.  At
> least have a warning in the help message about "extremely voluminous
> output".
>
Right. I suppressed the greatest part of this output some time ago, but I
realise now that I did it only in the development branch for some reason. (With
texdoc from master, full debug output is something like 200 lines, which is far
more reasonable.)

Thanks,
Manuel.