Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/7] [RFC] advice: refuse to output if stderr not TTY

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:39:20 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> Playing devil's advocate for a moment: what about programs that read
> stderr but intend to relay the output to the user?
>
> For example, programs running on the server side of a push are spawned
> by receive-pack with their stderr fed into a muxer that ships it to the
> client, who then dumps it to the user's terminal. Would we ever want to
> see their advice?
>
> My guess is "conceivably yes", though I don't know of a specific example
> (and in fact, I've seen the "your hook was ignored because it's not
> executable" advice coming from a server, which was actually more of an
> annoyance on the client side).

Ah, I should have waited to think about the topic before reading
what you wrote.  Yes, this is a huge downside.

> Looking over patch 7, I think the escape hatch for all of these cases
> would be setting GIT_ADVICE=1. Which isn't too bad, but it does require
> some action. I'm not sure if it is worth it (but then, I am not all that
> sympathetic to the script you mentioned that was trying to be too clever
> about parsing stderr).

This too.