develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from September 2016

Re: "Warning: perl appears in your path"

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Slaven Rezic
Date:
September 27, 2016 18:49
Subject:
Re: "Warning: perl appears in your path"
Message ID:
878tudxjr0.fsf@cvrsnica.herceg.de
Dave Mitchell <davem@iabyn.com> writes:

> When installing a non-devel perl, you typically get a message like the
> following on STDERR:
>
>     Warning: perl appears in your path in the following locations beyond where
>     we just installed it:
>         /bin/perl
>         /usr/bin/perl
>
> My thoughts are:
>
> 1) Do we really still need this message? It's very common these days when
> installing perl for the system to already have its own perl.
>
> 2) If we do need this message, should it be downgraded from 'Warning' to
> 'Note' and be sent to STDOUT rather than STDERR? Because there's nothing
> wrong with having multiple perls installed, and warning implies you're
> doing something wrong.

The purpose of STDERR is not to output just error messages, but all kind
of diagnostic messages --- in contrast to STDOUT, which usually contains
data, possibly processed in a pipe.

So if it changes to a note, it should still go to STDERR.

(That's why STDOUT is usually buffered while STDERR is not --- you want
to see the diagnostics as fast as possible, while the potentially large
data should be processed as fast as possible)

Regards,
    Slaven

-- 
Slaven Rezic - slaven <at> rezic <dot> de
  BBBike - route planner for cyclists in Berlin
  WWW version:                           http://www.bbbike.de
  Perl/Tk version for Unix and Windows:  http://bbbike.sourceforge.net

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About