[mythtv] Re: Typo in ivtvdecoder.cpp

Jeremiah Morris jm at whpress.com
Mon Feb 14 16:49:25 UTC 2005


On Feb 14, 2005, at 10:52 AM, David Engel wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 09:37:04AM -0500, Jeremiah Morris wrote:
>> It's a good opportunity to revisit this file and convert the cout/cerr
>> into VERBOSE messages as they should be...
>
> OK for the stuff a user might see, but why for the commented out,
> purely for debugging messages that are pretty much only for me?  Now,
> I would have to remember to use -v playback and see a bunch of other
> stuff I wouldn't want to see.

Basically, I didn't want to encourage that style from others looking at 
that code. If someone looked at ivtvdecoder.cpp for inspiration on 
their own feature, they would probably bypass the VERBOSE structure and 
tell testers to comment/uncomment various debug messages instead of 
using the built-in function for that. Since the code is the only 
programmer documentation, it should at least encourage good practice.

Once code is in CVS, there are no "only for me" cases; it's open for 
(mis)interpretation by everyone. Maybe we need another construct for 
this sort of message, I'm not saying it has to be a VERBOSE message, 
but cout/cerr are abused elsewhere and unless we follow our own rules, 
newcomers won't know any better. We'll either have to live with the 
reduced utility of VERBOSE or tell them to do as we say, not as we do; 
that's a time sink for us and extra frustration for them.

Sorry to go on about this, but "ad hoc" code has an annoying tendency 
to stick around, get copied, and create big messes in the future.

- Jer




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