[cs615asa] output

[Jan Schaumann]

Elliot Wasem <ewasem at stevens.edu> wrote:
 
> Should we output diagnostic information on the progress of the tool?

Since the program specification does not specify
whether any such information is printed, you may
choose to do so.

This is acceptable here because your program does not
need to produce any output; if it did provide some
sort of output, then you'd have to be careful to
separate that output from whatever diagnostics you
might wish to produce.

When writing tools like this, it's a good idea to
model them on the behavior of other, similar tools.
The various ec2* tools face the same problem you have
(some tasks take a long time) -- how do they handle
this?  Do they provide diagnostic output?  Remember to
write your tool such that it will fit in nicely into
the general ecosystem; i.e., it should not be
immediately obvious that it's a program written for a
CS assignment.

In any diagnostic messages, resist the temptation to
be overly verbose or funny.  Acceptable diagnostic
messages might be

$ command
Creating an instance in <region>... done.
Attaching volume <vol-id>... done.
Waiting for the instance <instance-id> to become ready... done.

etc.

Unacceptable output might be

$ command
Yo, still waiting.
Yo, still waiting.
Yo, still waiting.
Finally ready. Blarf.

-Jan