Send debug output to stderr

[snejus]

Given a task such as

[tasks.output-json]
cmd = """echo '{"some": "json"}'"""

I see the following output

$ poe output-json
Poe => echo '{"some": "json"}'
{"some": "json"}

Often, I need to pipe the output of a task to another command. For example, I want to use jq to format this JSON:

$ poe output-json | jq
jq: parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 4

This currently breaks, since poe logs the command it runs to stdout, together with the task output. I think, I would expect it to log to stderr instead.

For now, I use

$ poe output-json | grep -v '^Poe' | jq
{
  "some": "json"
}

to handle this.

What do you think, @nat-n?

[nat-n]

Hi @snejus,

I'd be open to sending poe's output to stderr, if there's a clear precedent from other tools like make to give confidence that this would not be surprising behavior.

In the mean time you can always pass the -q global option which will suppress this output per call. You can also configure tool.poe.verbosity = -1 to make this the default for your project.

I've also been considering whether it would be worth making the default verbosity configurable on the task level.

[aaronsteers]

+1 for sending all debug output to stderr so that the custom tasks can send clear stdout steam to their callers. I don't know about make, but this seems like a common pattern for tools that pass output to be consumed by other processes,

Possible workaround in this proposal:

• Set verbosity at the task level #310

(My workaround is to use -qq, but issues arise if other users forget to do so.)