← Back to team overview

ubuntu-elisp team mailing list archive

Putting byte compilation logs in a file obscures debugging

 

Following up on a thread from yesteryear (and then some), I would like
to suggest that maybe the byte compilation logs should not be saved in
a temp file at all.  It may have been appropriate when dpkg was the
primary .deb installation front end, but these days, with Synaptic and
Apport, most people don't see the terminal output from dpkg at all, and
those who do might actually want to see what went wrong right away,
rather than find a file in /tmp with an awkward name and read it
(provided they even notice the problem when it happens, rather than
later, when the file might have been erased).

This would require the postinst of the various emacsen packages to be
modified.  Perhaps it would be enough at this point to fix it only in
emacs23 and/or emacsen-common, and expect others to follow suit later.

Anyway, my suggestion would be something along the following lines:

0. Create the log file like before, but:
1. If running under Synaptic (or something like that), default to
printing the file after displaying the warning message, so that the byte
compilation log is included in /var/log/apt/term.log
2. Create a mechanism for overriding this, so that you can manually
select to print the byte compilation log always / never / when there is
a problem regardless of whether you are running under Synaptic (or
whatever)

I meant to file a bug suggesting this, but decided it might warrant some
discussion here on the list first.  For one thing, do you think this should
be filed against Ubuntu or against Debian?  I guess upstreaming to Debian
would be the default choice but they don't have a lot of users with
Apport so they might not perceive this as a problem which needs to be
solved.

FWIW thanks to siretart for fixing the old bug #413110 -- however, I
have never seen a bug report which actually included the byte
compilation logs.  I've been meaning to set up a test case to figure out
what went wrong but then if problems from the byte compilation logs are
not obscurely hidden in a temporary file, perhaps it could just be
backed out.

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.




Follow ups