Re: stderr patch

[Michael Brand <michael.ch.brand@gmail.com>]

Hi Ian

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Ian Kelling <ianowl@gmail.com> wrote:
> I use babel mostly for shell scripts. I wrote a patch to allow toggling the
> handling of errors & std err. I prefer standard error just get printed with
> everything else, the same as calling a script from a terminal. Doing this properly
> with header arguments etc. has been discussed before (google org-babel stderr),
> and just hasn't gotten done yet. Until then, this works great, so I'm putting it
> out there in case anyone wants to use it.

I am generally concerned about respecting the exit status [1] and
stderr of a process, also in Org babel [2]. Thank you for taking care
of it.

> +(defcustom org-babel-use-error-buffer t
> +  "When evaluating a code block, if nil and an error is returned
> +,no error buffer is created and. Standard error
> +is redirected to standard out."
> +:group 'org-babel
> +:version "24.1"
> +:type 'boolean)

For two reasons I would much prefer if there would be not yet another
variable org-* but a header argument or a new value for e. g.
":results":
- When someone would use org-babel-use-error-buffer then sharing Org
  source blocks would be less easy.
- With a header argument it would be possible to have different
  behaviors in different Org source blocks which is also a requirement
  for backward compatibility of existing source blocks (I would want
  them to let babel execution still fail in case of a problem).

There are also use cases where I would want to capture stderr but let
babel execution fail when the exit status is non-zero, see [2].

Michael

[1] My shell prompt ($PS1) contains the exit status ($?), my shell
    scripts contain "set -o errexit; set -o pipefail".
[2] See my lengthy post here:
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/45828/focus=46415