Re: sourceforge pserver is known bad. Should VCP work around?

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 01:47:02PM -0800, Matt Attaway wrote:
> > Question 1: Is it acceptable to break a VCP conversion just because
> > the underlying command emits stderr?
> >
> Sadly,  probably not. A lot of apps, Perforce included, occasionally
> spew non-critical error messages to STDERR. It would be nice if there
> was some way to tell VCP to ignore certain messages so that over time
> we can build up a list of non-critical messages.

That's how it's done now, grep the sources for "stderr_filter" and
you'll see some regular expressions that are used to match stderr and
ignore or react to matching output.

It's a short list and I'm worried about fragility in light of the CVS
weirdness we just tri[pped over at sourceforge.

> Likewise, sometimes really important error messages come out on
> STDOUT. We don't have to figure out what all to ignore right now, as
> long as there is a mechanism to do so going forward.

Nod.

> > Question 2: Should there be a user prompt before we bomb out of the
> > conversion?
> >
> That could be worthwhile. That may be another way to deal with non-critical
> errors, especially for this first release. It will give users a handy way
> to ignore pointless error messages while we sort out which ones we
> should ignore.

> > Question 3: Should there be a command line and .vcp file option to allow
> > the user to set policy?
> >
> Probably not. A flag to tell it to plough through no matter what might be
> useful. However, one of the interesting bits about people who are
> converting is that they usually know one system very well, and the
> other hardly at all. It would be hard for them to make any intelligent
> decision. The more smarts we can stick into VCP about what to ignore
> and what to listen to, I think the better off we will be.
> 
> Reading my response there, I realize I'm not sure what you mean by
> a policy. What do you envision?

Options to control VCP's response, perhaps like:

	--ignore-all-unexpected-errors
	--ignore-errors-matching=.*foo.*bar

- Barrie