'uptodate' output is *always* sent to DEVNULL

[smarie]

I just lost a few hours understanding why my tasks were always re-executing despite my 'uptodate' command string being ok (or so I thought).

My command was a multiline command (see #314 ).

It turned out that the error was, as always, a stupid mistake from my side. But I could have debugged it in a FAR shorter time if I had been able to see a few console prints confirming a few assumptions:

• that my 'uptodate' command was actually executed
• the contents of my 'uptodate' command
• and the stdout of my 'uptodate' command (so that I could introduce some debug prints

For example:

> Evaluating if <task_name>:<subtask_name> is up-to-date...
    - Executing command 'echo "hello" & conda activate blah & python -c "cool_code" & echo "ok"'
         hello
         ok
-- <task_name>:<subtask_name>

These messages could be printed 'by default', or in a verbose mode (there does not seem to be any global verbose flag by the way).

Thoughts ?

[schettino72]

I guess it is normal to say that developers need to modify their code (adding print statements or debugger breakpoints) in order to debug their code.

It seems all your problems could be easily done on user-land code.

[smarie]

I do not agree with your conclusions here: in the current status all standard output is captured (hidden) from 'updtodate' steps. So I can't effectively debug anything, even in a shell script (which is not what I want to do anyway because that would not be portable).

[schettino72]

Ok. you are right.
There should be a way to control if output of uptodate commands should be displayed...
Let me think about an interface for that.

[smarie]

Thanks for considering this. Once you have a better idea of what is the desired api, I can try to help implementing

[arichiardi]

Ran against this as well, please consider that clean can be a shell command as well and should probably get the same interface.