Re: [PATCH v2] gcov: Runtime configurable destination output

[Aaron Conole <aconole at redhat dot com>]

Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org> writes:

> On 04/27/16 16:59, Aaron Conole wrote:
>> Apologies for the top post. Pinging on this again. It still applies
>> cleanly, so no need to resubmit, I think. Is there anything else missing
>> or required before this can go in?
>
> I'm not convinced this is a desirable feature.  IIRC your rationale
> for it was that that you're somehow building the target program with
> inconsistent coverage data, and the messages about that are
> interfering with your program's output.
>
> That's kind of the point of error messages -- to get in your face.

Perhaps I've poorly explained what I want. I want to be able to pipe
gcov error messages to a different file for post-processing / reporting
elsewhere. I don't want them mixed with the application's messages. Do
you think this kind of generic flexibility is not a good thing, when it
comes at such little cost?

The whole point of this is to provide a way to keep the error messages
around. After all, if I really didn't want to see them I could do at
least the following things (untested, just for example):
  1. `./myapp 2>/dev/null` (which I don't want to do)
  2. { ...; fclose(stderr); stderr = fopen("gcoverrfile", "w"); exit(0); }
  3. mkfifo something; ./myapp 2>something; sed -e s,gcov_error_msg,,g something

But, this appeared to me like a generic way of providing what I want
in a way that could apply to any other application, without relying on
workarounds. If that's not a convincing argument, then I guess NAK it
and I'll be done with it - apologies for the noise.

Much thanks for your time,
-Aaron

> nathan