It should be easier to turn on and view notices in drush

The behavior I'm seeing is a bit odd. I can go into my CLI php.ini and set:

error_reporting  =  E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_STRICT

The following then works:

# php -r 'print error_reporting(); $var++; print " ... "; print $var;'
8191
Notice: Undefined variable: var in Command line code on line 1
 ... 1

If I turn off notices, then the notice goes away. So, it seems that I have control of the setting in the general case. If I try to observe notices within the context of drush, I never can. I can even insert the following code:

  drush_print('error reporting:' . error_reporting());
  error_reporting(E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_STRICT);
  drush_print('error reporting:' . error_reporting());

In this case, the first 'error reporting' message prints a value that is appropriate to my php.ini file setting (I can still change php.ini and see this value change), and the value changes in response to my call to error_reporting. However, the notice that should be printed on the next line is not printed. If I insert a call to "crash();" (an undefined function), then I see an error message for that, so this can't be a matter of the error messages being turned off or redirected to a file.

There is a comment in the php documentation:

If you have defined a custom error handler using set_error_handler() , the level of error reporting set using the error_reporting() function or configuration directive will only affect the E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR, and E_COMPILE_WARNING error levels. All other error levels are expected to be handled by the custom error handler.

Drush does not call set_error_handler, but it is called in _drupal_bootstrap_full(), so it seems I'm on to something... except commenting out that line does not change the behavior of drush.

This is with D6.

What do I have to do to get notices to show up when using drush?