Re: [PATCH] git stash: one bug and one feature request
- From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
- Date
- Jan 5, 2008, 00:29 UTC
- Message-ID
- <7vy7b5glmr.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
- In-Reply-To
- <e5bfff550801040814n82f34b2g17c485a207093440@mail.gmail.com>
"Marco Costalba" <mcostalba@gmail.com> writes:
> Otherwise git-stash is unusable by scripts that check > stderr to detect fail/success of launched command.
Sorry, but I happen to disagree with your notion of "having something on stderr is an error" to begin with. I think scripts written that way are either simply bogus, or are working around a defect in the underlying command it calls (perhaps it does not signal error with exit status properly).
A command that produces machine parsable output should write that out to stdout, and if it needs to emit other informational messages meant for human consumption (this includes progress bars), that should be sent to stderr so that scripts can get the meat of the output without having to filter cruft out.
If the command does not signal an error by exiting with non-zero status, that would be a bug indeed and you can fix that instead, I think.