How about `--stderr-prefix`?
...
I could make this option independent of `--merge` and always prefix each
line of the test script's stderr.
Sounds sensible to me. Clear behavior is good. I like that better than
implicitly turning on --merge.
I wonder if this should have a default prefix so that users
don't have to figure out how to pass `#`.
Hmm.
* `--stderr-prefix` by itself to prefix with the default of `# `
I haven't studied this, but I wonder about "#stderr# " as the default.
Maybe that's too verbose in practice.
* `--stderr-prefix custom-prefix` to prefix with `custom-prefix`
This would be a bit more complicated to implement because the script
would need a heuristic to determine whether the user passed a custom
prefix or not (such as, "there is an argument after `--stderr-prefix`
and that argument does not begin with `-`").
Optional argument heuristics don't sound ideal to me. tap-driver.sh
takes its final non-option argument, so if the new option ended up last,
there would be:
tap-driver.sh ... --stderr-prefix TEST-COMMAND
and nothing good would result. There's also the question of what to do
if the possibly-optional argument was "--". Let's just not go there.
Instead, as a nod to practicality aka kludge, I wonder about replacing
the string "sharp" (or "octothorpe", or some such) in the argument with a #.
difficult to portably add a `#` character to a
make variable, as you can see in the test I added.
Perusing your patch again, I see you used
printf %03o
to get around that. I hope that's portable in practice.
I wonder if automake actually works under EBCDIC. I wouldn't be
surprised if ASCII is assumed more or less throughout. Anyway, nice
defensive thinking there. :)
p.s. I requested a copyright assignment form.
Thanks much for all.
