lilypond too noisy on the cmd line

[Mark Veltzer]

Hello all!

First is first: thanks for a great piece of software.

This is a long standing feature request for me which you probably got from
hundreds of other users but I sent it anyway since I see it as a major pain.

When I run lilypond it is too noisy. It prints out lots of stuff (version,
progress and more) to standard error. This has several problems:

- It does not allow me to differentiate between good messages and bad. The basic
idea of standard output and error was to enable such a distinction. Lilypond
does away with this.
- Since I build lots of lily files in a makefile then I do not wish to see any
of the progress, version and standard messages, as I only want to see real
errors if they occur. This forces me to wrap lilypond invocation in a script
which collects it's output, waits for the return code and in the case that the
return code indicates an error with the lilypond process (probably parsing
error) then I print out the output which is still too verbose because it
contains a lot more than the errors.
- Other translators or even huge compilers (gcc to name famous ones) manage to
remain silent even though they do quite a lot under the hood so this is not an
unreasonable request.

Suggestions:
- version, progress and general messages which are not error messages should go
to stdout and NOT stderr.
- a --quiet flag should be added to shut down all of the regular messages which
are not error messages (meaning those going to stdout).
- In the long run I suggest that --quiet become the default since that is how
most compilers/translators behave (do their work quietly unless errors occur or
verbose mode is requested).

Please reply to my email as I am not a subscriber.

Cheers,
     Mark