Reducing noise in dmesg output

[Doug Barton]

Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
> 
> On Sep 4, 2009, at 6:52 AM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> 
>> No one has mentioned the other reason to leave in verbosity: so that
>> users
>> who are having problems can file more useful PRs.  This is particularly
>> true of video cards (which, as one might recall, is where this thread
>> started.)
> 
> This has always been an interesting fault-line.
> 
> Yes, if you print or log "everything" then there's bound to
> be useful information somewhere that can be used to analyze
> problems. Approaching this from the glass half-empty angle,
> I can see why people value verbosity. It's an easy case to
> state: without it we don't know what went wrong.
> 
> There's a flip-side and it's one that's much harder to argue
> for. Arguments against verbosity include such things as:
> 1.  The signal/noise ratio is worse which means that it's
>     easier to miss the information that is truly important.
> 2.  You present the user with output that's not even directed
>     towards the user -- it's an aesthetic bug.
> 3.  It introduces performance problems, especially on slow
>     consoles.
> 4.  If it works, it works and the verbosity is unnecessary.
> 
> Much more subjective...
> 
> As long as we depend on verbosity to provide us with the
> information we need to solve a problem, it's really hard to
> convince people that we should make it more user-oriented
> and print only things that are of value to the user. Which
> means that unless developers value the user perspective and
> are willing to put in the effort to allow for another way
> of obtaining the information, verbosity is hard to reduce.
> It's not in the developer's interest. That is, unless the
> problem reporting is actually much better if done differently.

Marcel has several good points here. I'd also like to point out that
there is a middle ground which I haven't seen mentioned yet,
dramatically reduce what goes to the console while sending all of what
we do now (or potentially even more) to syslog by default.

Doug

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