suppress stdout for cvmfs_server commands

[jose-caballero]

Hi,

can I suggest to implement the Rule of Silence for the cvmfs_server commands?
http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Only when a command like "cvmfs_server publish" fails, it could send to stderr the error. Otherwise, remain silent unless a -v (verbose) flag is passed.

Cheers,
Jose

[vvolkl]

Hi Jose,

I like the suggestion! However I suspect this may break user scripts - I'll put it on the agenda for tomorrow's coordination meeting.

[jose-caballero]

Maybe the opposite. Leave as it is, but add a -q (quiet) option to suppress the stdout, and only send error messages and tracebacks to the stderr.

[DrDaveD]

I wouldn't want to change the default behavior at this point since people expect it, but I could see some interest in a -q option on the publish command which people may run interactively. The snapshot command is usually put into log files and sometimes the default verbose output is useful for debugging things so I don't think it would be good to reduce that output. It's true that it can sometimes be challenging to find the most useful output when looking for problems but mostly I find it is the messages about aborting because another snapshot is already in progress that get in the way more than the progress messages. They look like this:

another update is in progress... aborting
ERROR from cvmfs_server, skipping push!

Maybe those messages should be changed to be just informational and not say anything about aborting or that there was an ERROR, since it is normal routine operation.