[crossfire] [Crossfire-cvs] CVS commit: client

[Mark Wedel]

  General quick thoughts:

  I removed them as I believe (rightly or wrongly) that software presented for 
general end user consumption should not be producing debug or information 
messages - it should only print error messages.  I'd almost be tempted to say 
that the default log level should even go one step higher, so that warnings 
should by default not be printed - only print error or above

  Off the top of my head, I can not think of any other unix/linux programs that 
produce a list of the rcsid versions of all the files when started.  I'm sure 
there are exceptions, but I think it is better of we behave like most other 
programs.

  I'm not even sure if the reporting of rcsid information has ever proved useful 
- I can't recall any bug reports where that has been provided.  Most useful bit 
of information that users can provide is the overal version number of the client 
they are using, not the version information of the specific files.

  A lot of this is also perception.  While perhaps no official complaints 
registered, I don't think it puts a good perception on the program.

  All that said, thoughts on how to fix this:

1) Within the client itself, this information should be presented in the GUI. 
For the gtk client, I'm going to modify the bug report page to include this 
information.  For the gtk2 client, I'll make an about page that also includes that.

  If in fact most people are running the client from a launcher and not seeing 
the messages, then they aren't doing any good (that seems like counter argument 
- no one will see the messages, so having them there doesn't harm anything).  So 
having an in-client way to display them is better.

2) The log level should not be a compiled in default - one should be able to 
specify it via command line (-loglevel 0) or whatever.  In that case, if user 
has a bug, we can always say 'run with -loglevel 0' and provide us the output. 
This is more useful in all cases, as by default, old log level was 1 so we 
couldn't get debug level output without requesting the user to recompile (which 
doesn't work when it is prebundled).  This should be pretty easy to do I think.

  How do those remedies sound to people?