Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:53:26 -0400
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] emacs: show: stop stderr appearing in buffer
Message-ID: <20130912145326.GK1426@mit.edu>
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Quoth Mark Walters on Sep 12 at 10:33 am:
> 
> Hi
> 
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2013, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> >> Ideally, we would put this output in the notmuch errors buffer but the
> >> handler is called asynchronously so we don't know when the output will
> >> appear. Thus if we put it straight into the errors buffer it could get
> >> interleaved with other errors, otoh we can't easily tell when we
> >> have got all the error output so can't wait until the process is complete.
> >
> > Hi Mark;
> >
> > I think your patch is OK, but would it be much harder to created a named
> > buffer like *notmuch-view-$message-d* ? (using e.g. the code from
> > notmuch-show). I might make debugging easier.
> 
> Yes this is easy. There are several possibilities and I am not sure
> which is best (some are clearly bad but are worth mentioning anyway).
> 
> 1) have a single buffer for part errors; this would accumulate stuff and
> output seems to get interleaved so this is probably useless.
> 
> 2) have a buffer for each part viewer as you describe.
> 
> 3) have a buffer for each part viewer but start its name with a space so
> it doesn't show up in buffer lists but is findable (maybe)

3.5) Say something in the echo area when a viewer terminates with
output, so it doesn't interrupt the user if they're doing something,
but the output buffer is still discoverable.  Maybe bind C-c ` to show
the most recently reported output buffer, like what (la)tex-mode and
others do, and mention this binding in the echo area message.

> 4) stick with just the temp buffer approach
> 
> Also, we could have it togglable with some sort of debug flag. In some
> senses 3 is nice but you would probably end up with 10's or even
> hundreds of hidden buffers which seems bad. In 2 you see them so you
> probably kill them as you go but I think they would be pretty
> annoying. A key difference from the accumulated show/search/pick buffers
> is that, at some point, you did want to see those buffers.

3.5.1) Don't create a buffer until the command has output (or, easier
to implement: create the buffer, but kill it on exit if there was no
output).  When starting a new command, kill output buffers from
no-longer-running viewers that have never been visited (using
buffer-display-count or buffer-display-time).

> Since all these approaches are easy to implement it is really up to us
> which we want.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> >
> > Of course those buffers would accumulate, along with show, search and
> > pick buffers...
> >
> > Or we could push this as is, and add some debugging facility later like
> > a variable notmuch-view-errors-buffer.
> >
> > d