Remove Zenmap output redirection?

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

Hi,

Does anyone object to the removal of Zenmap's redirection of stdout and
stderr? On startup Zenmap normally redirects stdout and stderr to files
whose names are generated with mktemp. So anything that normally would
be displayed on the screen is written to those files instead. This
redirection can be disabled by defining the environment variable
ZENMAP_DEVELOPMENT.

I think that this was once introduced because Zenmap used to print a
bunch of stuff on the screen. Now it doesn't. The only thing it still
prints by default is a "critical" message showing the Nmap commands that
is being run, and the severity of that message can be reduced so even
that isn't printed ("critical" is inappropriate for that message
anyway).

The redirection has caused problems in the past by hiding exception
messages: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2007/q4/0457.html. It gets in the
way of developers who do want to see console messages. Removing this
would reduce slightly Zenmap's use of mktemp. (Try "ls /tmp" after
running Zenmap for a while.)

By default no console messages would be printed. Using -v multiple times
would enable progressively more of them. The ZENMAP_DEVELOPMENT variable
would retian its current function of disabling the automatic crash
reporter.

David Fifield

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