Re: Environment variable to turn off carets

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   >  3) I don't think there is any precedence to use environment
   >     variables to change the output in this manner.

   What about GCC_COLORS?

Didn't know about that one.  Thanks!  But that only applies to
changing GCC behaviour, not all GNU programs.

   > It would be far easier to, I think, in the long run specially, to
   > amend the behaviour of -fxxx type of options where they would
   > produce a warning instead of a hard error.

   This part of the problem is about giving this option where an old
   version is installed, and old versions of gcc and bison fail hard.
   You cannot change old versions retroactively.

True, which is why it would be a long term change.

   > To have different behaviour between compilation runs, I would
   > recommend creating a config.site file that one uses whith the
   > specific settings.

   It's not necessarily site-wide. I may, e.g. build one thing within
   an editor where I don't want carets, and simultaneously something
   else on the command-line where I do. It's "job"-wide, and
   environment variables have exactly the right scope for this.

config.site can be site wide, you can also have something like,

if $NO_CARET; then
  FLEXFLAGS=-fno-caret
  CFLAGS=-fno-diagnostics-caret
fi

In there to enable/disable things more easily.

   > In which you can pass the correct flag to the respective
   > programs.  This has the benefit that for the programs that do
   > have ADA caret output, but do not support this environment
   > variable, you can still silence it.

   The user would still need to check each program (regularly after
   updates) to find out which of them have such options and what
   they're called in each case. That's an unnecessary burden on the
   user. The programs themselves know very well what they support in
   each version, and adding the environment variable check is a
   one-time job per program (vs. once per user, program, and version).

Yes, but the user would have to do that anyway, in the cases where you
still get caret output.  I would be quite confused if I get caret
output despite saying that I don't want it.

Not against the idea, just wondering if there might be a better way of
doing this that will work with other similar features.  You brought up
one such example, with GCC_COLORS.  Adding a dozen different
environment variables every time one wishes to modify the behaviour of
various programs seems like a slipery slope.

Do we add a NO_WARNINGS?  NO_OUTPUT?  Maybe just keeping a config.site
file that users can install would be much easier, it could be part of
the GNU coding standards, as an example, or someone else could
maintain it.  The benefit of that is that _all_ programs can have
supressed output of some sort -- not just programs that support
NO_CARET_OUTPU.