Dear OdyX, On Wednesday 08 August 2012 16:10:34 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: > > In Debian the recommendation for all init scripts is to check the > > variable VERBOSE from /etc/default/rcS and only print a message on > > console only if this variable is not 0. > > From the content of the debian-policy package, I don't think that's true; > can you point me to where this recommendation comes from ?
This is not in current policy as far as I'm aware. However /etc/init.d/skeleton use value of VERBOSE variable to decide whenever show or suppress messages produced during start/stop actions. VERBOSE variable is briefly documented in rcS(5) man page and most scripts in /etc/init.d are controlling verbosity according to /etc/rcS:VERBOSE. Occasionally people report bugs something like "lack of respect for rcS:VERBOSITY in init.d/some-daemon breaks splash screen....". At the moment I found the following message which may be relevant: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=208010#233 There might be something else of course.... > As only the init scripts themselves can know which of the messages handed > to the log_msg_* functions are important or not, I think the > responsability of handling an eventual VERBOSE variable is upon the > individual iniscripts and not upon lsb-base. Good point, but if implemented, documented behaviour of LSB functions in that regards will help to reach consistent print-out behaviour. Perhaps it is possible to decide which functions will respect VERBOSITY settings. This may help developers to adjust respective scripts, eventually (in long term). > > Is that correct that [info] messages are only printed by > > 'log_action_msg'? > > Correct. > Thank you. > > It may be used for messages like "service is already running" and I'm not > > sure if we want to suppress such messages. > > Indeed, there's no way to differentiate useful from useless log messages. > Very true... I'm not sure how shall we decide the final behaviour. > I think that the fact that a call to log_*_msg always leads to having a > message printed is actually a feature and a characteristic of these shell > functions. Changing this interface to start printing messages conditionally > is a quite intrusive change IMHO. You're right, I'm with you. But in the end it comes down to whatever Debian scripts should respect VERBOSITY setting - if so such support would be much more effectively implemented in lsb-base rather than hope that every maintainer will make sure their scripts correctly obey it. > Although I would have been tempted to directly tag +wontfix or mark the bug > - done, I'm hereby tagging as +moreinfo to see if I can get convinced. Thank you, this is much appreciated. Desregarding of the outcome I hope your decision may help to clarify some aspects of init scripts' VERBOSITY. All the best, Dmitry. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
