Bug#934655: libglib2.0-0: provide environment variable to suppress or redirect logging

brian m. carlson sandals at crustytoothpaste.net
Tue Aug 13 00:31:04 BST 2019


Package: libglib2.0-0
Version: 2.60.6-1
Severity: normal

Currently, GLib and various other GTK+-related software provide logging,
which goes to stdout or stderr. Much of this logging is developer
focused and basically warns developers that they are doing questionable
things that one or another toolkit is unhappy with.

While this is great for debugging and developer visibility, it's not
great for end users who invoke GTK+-based programs from the terminal,
where the messages obscure previous output, sometimes scrolling the
screen significantly. In the past, GVim has been bitten by this
prominently, but various other software, including atril (a PDF viewer)
and other tools commonly run from the command line, have fallen victim
to it as well. The most inconvenient part for users is that upgrading
one of the shared libraries a piece of software uses can cause it to
emit many more warnings than before, with little recourse.

Asking individual packages to fix these issues is not effective,
because, as is the nature with open source, developers lack the time to
effectively fix all issues, and these issues are seen as purely
cosmetic. I've asked several packages to do so, and the turnaround time
for fixing these issues is usually measured in years, if they are fixed
at all.

GLib should learn an environment variable to either suppress non-fatal
messages (i.e., those that do not cause the program to abort) or
redirect them to a file (e.g., /dev/null). Even if upstream does not
want this feature, Debian should provide it.

This is a common issue with multiple questions online, and would provide
a large amount of value to users.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages libglib2.0-0 depends on:
ii  libc6        2.28-10
ii  libffi6      3.2.1-9
ii  libmount1    2.34-0.1
ii  libpcre3     2:8.39-12+b1
ii  libselinux1  2.9-2+b2
ii  zlib1g       1:1.2.11.dfsg-1+b1

Versions of packages libglib2.0-0 recommends:
ii  libglib2.0-data   2.60.6-1
ii  shared-mime-info  1.10-1
ii  xdg-user-dirs     0.17-2

libglib2.0-0 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204
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