DUMP is too verbose

[bzs at bu-cs.bu.edu]

(are we nitpicking yet?)

I use dump a lot, so do my operators (a lot more, at least two
or three times a day), I've never heard dump being too verbose
come up in a conversation and we bitch about everything if for
no other reason than to maintain human contact.

I think the complaint that it wastes paper is a red herring,
computing centers use massive amounts of paper and shortening
out a few lines of messages from Dump would be the last place
I would look to economize, hey, I've got students running off
resumes like they were on the Times' best sellers' list. A
decent preview for TeX would probably save the lives of millions
of trees in America...need I go on?

I think it repeats itself simply because on a paper console
it's easy to lose a prompt if you walk away for awhile. The
nature of a dump is that the tape can take a fairly long and
indeterminate amount of time to spin. The nature of consoles
is console messages, that's what it's there for, no?

If you did dumps in my shop on a CRT I would tell you to go
use the paper console, we save our console logs and if I go
back to a dump tape and it isn't right I want to look up
the dump that was done to see what went wrong if possible.
A dump here is critical and treated like a banking transaction.

I think this is a non problem, why don't you write a filter
that removes what you don't want to hear and say 'dump |& filter'
or something like that and see if it's any better?

Finally, you try to use 'employee relations' as a possible
point of contention. Although it certainly would be possible
to harass a person with a program they have to use (keystroke
counting is a notorious example for data-entry clerks) I doubt
very much this even approaches that. Why don't you just offer
to go for coffee once in a while and leave it at that.

He thinks we are trivializing his complaints, I think it's a
trivial complaint and regret having written this much. Maybe
switch this to net.unix or even net.cog-eng as that's the
realm you are in, changing the strings in a program is not
a terribly wizardly issue, is it? (prompts, strings whatever.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University