Re: [Gnash-dev] gnashing teeth

[Rob Savoye]

Howard Chu wrote:

> Along the lines of this complaint
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2009-02/msg00054.html
> gnash was printing its silly "parsing file" message to *stdout* and not
> to stderr, which was extremely annoying. (In 0.8.4, haven't checked
> current source yet.)

  The patch to quiet that is in trunk, and will be in the next release.

> I had to go through a number of contortions to make it all work. Took at
> least 4 runs of configure and two compiles before I figured out I needed
> to --enable-extensions=FILEIO and --enable-debugger, buried among all
> the other build errors/warnings I was getting. (E.g., it said "you can
> ignore these errors" for missing libgif, libjpeg, etc., which was false,
> those were fatal errors for the build.)

  While it should be possible to build Gnash without gif, png, or jpeg
libraries, it's entirely possible that is broken, as most of us building
Gnash all the time have these packages installed. However using
--enable-debugger is to be discouraged, as that code should effect
nothing in the build, and is seriously bit-rotted as well from lack of
use. --enable-extensions=fileio is also not used by the core of Gnash,
it's an external plugin that as a non-standard ActionScript class
shouldn't ever be used. So neither of these options should have changed
anything in the build at all, other than enabling either may break the
build.

> I'd like to request that a neutered FILEIO be enabled by default -
> specifically, allow printf/puts by default. Also, I'd like

  The fileio extension has nothing to do with output to stdout or
stderr, it's an external thing. Debugging output is controlled by the
"-vv", "-va", and "-vp" options.

> if you want gnash and ActionScript to actually be useful in a generic
> Linux environment, you've got to make it capable of behaving well in a
> standard pipeline. That means being able to read from stdin, and write
> to stdout/stderr in the default build. And it has to be able to exit
> when its work is done.)

  I think you must be using a much older snapshot of Gnash, I don't
believe any of the more recent ones have and of these problems. I have a
tendency to use stderr myself, because I like being able to separate out
error messages I insert while debugging from the normal debug message
flow. Anything in Gnash that isn't using one of the log_*() functions is
potentially a bogus message for anyone but the developer (me) who
inserted them, and can be ignored or commented out.

  Which distribution were you building Gnash on ?

        - rob -