Optional Gaia server messages?

[robertdstein]

Right now I am using astroquery as a dependency for a package, and have doc tests that involve my module. These occasionally break, because of gaia status messages which get printed directly to stdout.

astroquery/astroquery/gaia/core.py

Line 1025 in ade38dc

def get_status_messages(self):

That's fair enough, I think most users might want to see these messages by default. However, I would personally like to switch them off. So I try using the kwarg argument to switch them off:

from astroquery.gaia import GaiaClass
Gaia = GaiaClass(show_server_messages=False)

which makes use of:

astroquery/astroquery/gaia/core.py

Line 89 in ade38dc

if show_server_messages:

In theory that should work, but right at the bottom of the script defining the GaiaClass class, there is this line:

astroquery/astroquery/gaia/core.py

Line 1048 in ade38dc

Gaia = GaiaClass()

That creates a GaiaClass object, and uses the default settings (i.e show_server_message=True). So, by time I've hit the line from astroquery.gaia import GaiaClass I already get the stdout message.

As a workaround I can send things to dev null for that one specific import line, but it seems to me like the show_server_message argument is not behaving as intended, so I thought I would create the github issue here first.

Options I can think of to fix this include be to using the python logger rather than print (then I can toggle the message on/off), have the default of the printing set by an environment level, or setting a default of show_server_message=False. Apologies if a discussion about this already exists.