Re: Turn off GTK+ warnings

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 1 April 2017 at 11:05, Stuart Longland <stuartl longlandclan id au> wrote:
> On 01/04/17 17:41, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> > On Sat, 2017-04-01 at 16:53 +1000, Stuart Longland wrote:
> > > How, as a user, do I go about silencing these warnings?

- Doctor, doctor! My arm hurts when I move it this way!
- Then don't move it this way

You're blaming the nervous system notifying you that you're doing
something wrong and/or painful, and you're asking to ignore the pain,
instead of figuring out the cause and fixing that.

The pain you feel is the message; you fix the cause, not the pain.

> > I don't think it is a good idea to ignore such warnings as a user in
> > general case. There may be very few warnings, for which it may be ok to
> > ignore it. But generally, there is a reason why warnings are shown.
> > Indicating that something is wrong, and the software may not work
> > properly.
> >
> > I would very strong try to avoid software which continuesly emit
> > warnings -- that may be an indication that the software is stale,
> > nobody cares about it, so it may have dangerous (security) bugs.
> >
> > One example was indeed gvim, I have stopped using it.
>
> Well, in my case it isn't `gvim` that's emitting the warnings, its GTK+.
>  `gvim`'s (ab)use of the GTK+ library might be the underlying cause, but
> GTK+ is what's polluting stderr.

GTK+ is not "polluting" stderr: it's emitting a warning that the
application is doing something wrong at run time. The application is
causing the warning.

You should file a bug against the application that is creating those
warnings. Of course, since some application authors simply don't care
that their application is generating warnings (otherwise they'd have
already fixed it) your bet as to what will happens next is as good as
mine. As a toolkit developer I can only tell you that GTK+ won't stop
emitting those warnings because that's how application developers
identify and fix bugs in their code — and, sometimes, in GTK+ itself.

> > If you really need that software, you may contact its author or
> > maintainers of your OS distribution, maybe it is a problem of the
> > distribution, maybe they ship too old or incompatible libraries or are
> > doing something just wrong.
>
> Well as it happens, I do need GTK+, and hence, I believe this is the
> mailing list for the authors of GTK+. :-)

This is gtk-list; if you want to contact the GTK+ developers you
should use gtk-devel-list gnome org.

We'll tell you the same thing I told you above, though: file a bug
against the application that emits the warnings.

> > So we should be happy that these warnings are shown at all, it would be
> > much worse when they are invisible or do not exist at all and software
> > just malfunctions in rare cases.
>
> I'm not saying to get rid of the warnings, to a developer, they are very
> useful clues as to what might be wrong with an application.

> For me as a user, they are useless junk that is cluttering up my
> terminal session, pushing data I actually *do* care about off the
> scrollback buffer and making my life harder.

There's no way for an application, or a library, or any computer
program really, to discern intent or context.

Even if there was a way for you to provide context — an environment
variable, a toggle to remove warnings — the underlying issue is that
anything that comes after a critical warning inside GTK+ steps you
into "undefined behaviour" territory. Your application may cease to
work at any point, eat all your data, and turn you into a frog,
waiting for the kiss of minor royalty to break the spell. A "simple"
warning is less severe, but generally points to a misuse of the GTK+
API to the point of breaking internal assumptions — and it usually
leads to a critical warning somewhere down the line, with all that it
entails (crash, data loss, amphibian transfiguration).

You, as a user, have a single recourse: file a bug against the
application that causes the warning.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]