Re: non-interactive usage and color error messages

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Saturday 24 October 2009, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> > > It is neither nice or useful when gnuplot is writing error message such as:
> > > 
> > > Error: terminal "dumb" does not support continuous colors.
> > > This terminal does not support palette-based images.
> > > This terminal does not support rgb images.
> > > This terminal does not support filled polygons.
> > > 
> > > when in non-interactive mode (e.g. driven via Octave). They are actually 
> > > just warnings, not errors.
> >
> > Every message that is generated by 
> >   fprintf(stderr,ERROR_NOTICE(foo))
> > should be changed to use int_warn() instead.
> 
> Good idea. These ERROR_NOTICEs are actually warnings only, not errors. I've 
> tried to patch this replacement in color.c and graphics.c, it works fine.

I am inclined to agree that warning "this terminal does not support..."
is not very useful.  Maybe we should jusr remove these altogether.

> Constructions with ERROR_NOTICE are found also in gplt_x11.c. It seems to me 
> that they serve for reporting problems with ipc communication, so they 
> should "never" happen. 

I have actually seen these trigger, and used them to debug problems with the 
x11 terminal.  Of course, that's probably only useful for developers.  
So maybe these should be wrapped in #if (DEBUG) ... #endif ?