[ENH] Tidy should be quieter with Quiet option

This report is for the Tidy version of 13th January 2000.

The "quiet" option reports that its function is to "suppress nonessential 
output."  Currently, this will suppresses the output of the welcome message 
and the summary of the numbers of errors and warnings.  However, I believe 
that it would be helpful if "quiet" also suppressed the "general info" 
emitted as the last paragraph for files containing warnings or errors.  In 
my view, the general info at the end is also "nonessential output."  This 
can be changed by altering lines 1116-1117 of tidy.c from:

  if (totalerrors + totalwarnings > 0)
      GeneralInfo(errout);

to:

  if (!Quiet && (totalerrors + totalwarnings > 0))
      GeneralInfo(errout);


I also believe that "quiet" should suppress the summary of error 
remediation recommendations for the same reason.  This can be done by 
altering line 1102 from:

  ErrorSummary(lexer);

to:

  if (!Quiet)
    ErrorSummary(lexer);

With these two changes, "quiet" will suppress all nonessential information 
from the report.  However, if the current "quiet" behavior is deemed best, 
perhaps a new level of quietness, e.g., "quieter", could be introduced that 
would have this effect.


As a separate issue, I think the number of errors and warnings and Tidy's 
interpretation of the HTML version, e.g., "xxx appears to be yyy", should 
be reported always, regardless of the "quiet" setting.  The assumed HTML 
version especially is important if one is to be able to interpret in the 
proper context the errors and warnings that appear when "quiet" is used.  
To me, this is "essential information."

If the current behavior is believed best, then I would recommend 
introducing a new "summary-always" configuration option that controls the 
output of these two lines and that defaults to "no".  In the "no" mode, the 
summary lines would be suppressed as part of "quiet".  In the "yes" mode, 
the summary lines would be output always.

                                      -- Dave

Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2000 13:10:42 UTC