Re: [gentoo-user] Why are gentoo people so in love with colorized output?!?

[felix@crowfix.com]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 03:29:42PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:09:30 +0300, Daniel Iliev wrote:
> 
> > Exactly. So, MHO is that it would be better if all the output from
> > console apps was just plain text with the option for people who want
> > colors to enable and customize colors, wouldn't it?
> 
> Why? all you're doing there is changing to a different default colour
> scheme (one where all text is the same). I really don't see the point in
> changing, when I suspect the majority prefer colours. Switching colour
> on and off is simple enough, to why disturb the status quo?

(a) The unix standard for ages has been simple plain text output.
Gentoo breaks that standard with a color default.  Gentoo has broken
the standard; gentoo ought to honor the standard.

(b) Switching color off is easier than you might imagine, since all of
the following DO NOT WORK:

TERM=vt100
|less
NOCOLOR=true
--nocolor
--color=n
editing /usr/bin/emerge to always set havecolor = 0

> What is absolutely clear is that none of this will be brought about by
> ranting at and insulting the devs who do this for no pay. In fact, such
> posts are against the new Gentoo Code of Conduct.

I will explain why I consider gentoo to be run by amateurs, and I
don't mean in the old sense of unpaid vs professionals, I mean in the
shoddy sense of "try again in the next release" trial and error coding I
have seen.

Some bright eyes linked /bin/ls against some /usr/lib library, maybe
gpm, I forget, which made my system unbootable.  No boot partition
command should EVER be linked outside the boot partition.

Some genius set up an ebuild to remove a library which /bin/lvm was
linked against, which made my system unbootable.

Several other now-forgotten similar breakages which rendered my system
unbootable.  Gentoo is the absolute first Unix system I have used in
25 years which I have been leery of rebooting for wondering if I will
have to break out the rescue disk yet again.

As for colorization, my recollection is that it first appeared as hard
coded escape sequences in every single message in /usr/bin/emerge.
This was such atriociously bad  coding that I just edited it out,
figuring that a bug report would be lost on such feeble minds.

It then moved to actual variable assignments with the appropriate
names, still hard coded.  What the heck is termcap / terminfo for if
worked around like that?  Once more I shook my head and edited it out
rather than waste time educating supposedly intelligent developers on
the horrors of hard coded magic values.  For some reason, hard coded
magic numbers seem to be a favorite of newbies, and I have long since
learned that those developers who like hard coded magic numbers seem
to be particularly dead set against having anyone tell them why that
is bad practice.

Along the way, various color controls appeared, none of them working
particularly well.  I have listed them above.  None of them work.
Apparently the Gentoo standard is to add features without testing
them.  Somewhere along the way, "--nocolor" became unfashionable and
was replaced by "--color=n", but "--nospinner" is still favored,
possibly because the fad police haven't discovered it yet and replaced
it by "--spinner=n".  Or maybe they have become bored with fussing
with managing options and have moved on to some trendier busy work.

I use gentoo because portage *mostly* works, the ebuild packages
*mostly* work, I have an amd64 system and slackware has no 64 bit
version (I am aware of the unofficial one), I can't stand RedHat and
the other big corporate systems, and Debian leaves me cold with its
political bickering.  I do NOT advise friends to use gentoo, and I
would be amazed if any business tried to use it for production.

-- 
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com
  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o
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