Fall back to ttydrv

[Andreas Mohr]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 11:25:44AM +0200, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
> >>>>> "Dimitrie" == Dimitrie O Paun <dpaun at rogers.com> writes:
> 
>     Dimitrie> On April 14, 2003 06:11 pm, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
>     >> + MESSAGE( "Falling back to ttydrv\n");
> 
>     Dimitrie> Again, I'd say this message is not appropriate, especially now
>     Dimitrie> that the user has to enable this configurations. For people
>     Dimitrie> using command line tools under Wine will be just pure spam.
> 
> Should the message have higher or lower annoyance levels?
He probably wants it to disappear.
I think we need that, however, since it is non-intuitive behaviour to
completely silently fall back to ttydrv-only output when DISPLAY is not set.
(just think of how many people were completely puzzled due to wineinstall
failing and leaving GraphicsDriver set to ttydrv in the config file
at some time!)
Anyway, in its current form the message is probably not very useful,
since it doesn't explain what really happened.
Note also that by providing the fallback, you are silencing the usual
Error: Can't open display: 
message (which incidentally is not very useful either ;)
which people could search for on the Internet to find the reason why
Wine doesn't work at all.
Instead, we'd silently fall back to text (not giving any message to assist
people), thus worsening the situation: from a non-working wine and a
badly understandable but at least searchable error to an almost non-working
wine (ttydrv) and no error at all to get a clue from.

Thus I'd have a message and change it to something like
Warning: environment variable DISPLAY [which is ]needed for X11 graphics output
not set, thus falling back to [ttydrv] text-only output
[, no graphics displayed].

Parts in [] are optional but maybe useful.

Or maybe a much better form would be
Warning: environment variable DISPLAY not set: no X11 graphics output possible,
[I ]need to fall back to text-only output [via ttydrv].

-- 
Andreas Mohr                        Stauferstr. 6, D-71272 Renningen, Germany
Tel. +49 7159 800604                http://mohr.de.tt