Failures and Verbosity

[Andy Armstrong]

On 20 Feb 2009, at 23:12, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> While hacking in a new flag to show test comments, I noticed that the
> 'failures' option made the 'verbose' option, when it's 1, much less
> verbose. That seems backwards to me. Should it not be that, when
> 'failures' is true, it shows failures, but when 'verbose' is >= 1, it
> should show everything, no matter what 'failures' is set to?
>
> The docs day "Only show test failures (this is a no-op if C<verbose>
> is selected)." That seems much more consistent to me, although I'd
> like to get rid of the "Only" at the beginning. Should I change that,
> or have people come to depend on the existing (weird) version?


In the old days we had even more options controlling which - and how  
much - output we generated. The scalar verbosity control replaced  
three (I think) booleans but I guess there's still work to be done to  
make the various features switches work nicely with the verbosity level.

A good start would be to summarise exactly which options we have and  
what they do; it's obviously become complex enough that none of us  
remembers what all of them do - which doesn't bode well for anyone  
else being able to use them...

-- 
Andy Armstrong, Hexten