en/debian/banner.txt
2004-01-11
The annoying banner thingie
I started the grep-dctrl rewrite last spring. I soon had most of the code implemented, and I asked for testers on -devel. There were no debs at that time, and so it probably was not much of a surprise that nobody volunteered. I got discouraged and abandoned the project for several months.
In August, just before my vacation at work ended, I decided to polish the code, and I did. I prepared debs and was ready to submit them to unstable. (At that time I was under the impression that experimental was the wrong place for any grep-dctrl stuff.) I felt it was necessary to warn users about the code, since it was sure to contain nasty surprises. I considered sending a mail to some lists: -devel-announce would have reached my audience, but the message would have been inappropriate there; I feared it would not be noticed in -devel. I considered a message at installation time,either with debconf or without. However, debconf messages are seen by system administrators and not users, so that was not an attractive option. I finally decided on that annoying banner:
==========================================================================
NOTE
grep-dctrl has been rewritten from scratch. Although this does add new
features, regressions are certainly possible. Please watch for them and
report them to the BTS.
==========================================================================
(The above annoying banner will not be shown to you again, unless you
request it with the -B switch. It will also be removed entirely soon.)
I took great care to make the banner as unobtrusive as possible, still taking in account that it had to be prominent to have any effect. I added logic that would suppress the banner after a user had seen it once (using a dotfile in home directories, ~/.grep-dctrl-banner-shown; if you find one in your home directory, you can now safely remove it). I did not print it to stdout (it would clobber the output) nor to stderr (it might be redirected, which would have been counterproductive); rather, I used /dev/tty. After all, many people use grep-dctrl in scripts without realizing it; especially they would need to know that there was a weak link there.
Nevertheless, I expected to get flamed for this. To my considerable surprise, I got no reactions - aside from several good and substantial bug reports. The banner stayed in longer than I intended, mainly because I was exhausted by my teaching duties during the autumn. I finally removed it last week, in 1.103.
And then, several days after the banner had been removed, I get a bug report (which, strangely, is still open even though I sent a closing message almost 24 hours ago). That's when I decided to post this entry.
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