Re: "-dshow-available-fonts" vs. UNIX stdout?

[David Kastrup]

Tim Roberts <address@hidden> writes:

> Ramana Kumar wrote:
>> FWIW I agree that -dshow--available-fonts should write to stdout.
>
> Before this goes much further, please realize that this is a matter of
> opinion.  There is no unambiguously correct answer to this issue.  The
> fact is that lilypond writes the output to stderr, and that's the way
> it is.  As long as you know that, there's no problem.
>
> Most folks with Unix command-line experience, when noticing that the
> output wasn't caught in stdout, would automatically try stderr (2>)
> next.

If you are _only_ interested in the output of -dshow-available-fonts,
having it interspersed with diagnostics is not going to be helpful.  You
might argue that one can just switch off diagnostics, but this will
actually also switch off the font list.

LilyPond is an actively developed project, so "that's the way it is" is
not necessarily the same as "that's the way it will always be", and
discussing the question "what's the way it should be?" is not pointless.

-- 
David Kastrup