Re: yet another patch to reduce make output

[Jason Kraftcheck]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 08:43 -0600, Jason Kraftcheck wrote:
>> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>>> Hello Jason,
>>>
>>> thanks for your work.  While I'm not to judge this, and pretty
>>> indifferent about it, a couple of question to clarify a bit:
>>>
>>> * Jason Kraftcheck wrote on Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 11:36:55PM CET:
>>>> This patch prefixes the compile and link commands in the generated
>>>> Makefile's with $(AM_PFX).  It leaves AM_PFX undefined, so the default
>>>> behavior is unchanged.  If a package maintainer wants to change the
>>>> output, (s)he can do something like: AM_PFX = @echo "$@ ...";
> 
> If you really want to reduce verbosity, you can't avoid making it a
> configuration-time or run-time option, not an automake-option, otherwise
> you are forcing people not liking your style of "verbosity", to patch
> around into your sources.

I wasn't suggesting that it be an automake option.  I suppose someone
could use this to do something unpleasant like hard-code AM_PFX=@ in their
Makefile.am's.  But if the mechanism for suppressing the output is
standardized, at least you could more easily override it:
  AM_PFX= make -e

> 
>>> What's the improvement over
>>>   AM_MAKEFLAGS = -s
> Did you try setting "MAKEFLAGS=-s" in your environment?

No.  But I don't want it to be entirely silent.  I like to see some
indication of what is begin built.

> 
> Frankly speaking, I am still far from finding your intention helpful.
> Such "non-verbose" makefiles are a massive PITA, for example during
> Fedora package reviews and when debugging broken Makefiles.

The change I suggested allowed for reducing the output if one desires to.
 Presumably, if a package maintainer chooses to utilize this feature at
all they will provide some configure option to enable/disable it.  It is
certainly my intention to have have the default be to echo the build
commands for the package I intend to use this in.

If this type of output bothers you so much, wouldn't it make more sense to
have a standard way to restore the normal output (e.g. AM_PFX=  make -e)
than to have to override whatever random scheme the package manager chose
to suppress the output (e.g. some custom modification of automake).

- jason