Re: [PATCH] build: use automake's --silent-rules option when possible

[Russ Allbery]

Ralf Corsepius <address@hidden> writes:
> Jim Meyering wrote:

>> Since I bootstrap using automake from its "next" branch, it's
>> enabled for me.  And that translates to enhanced Makefile.in
>> files in the tarballs I generate.  The net result is that when
>> you run "make" (using distributed Makefile.in files), you'll
>> see something like this:

>>  ...
>>  CC  id.o

> Now your users won't see the "silent bugs" your package comes with.

I'm planning on doing the same thing with my packages because I think my
users will see the bugs *better*.  One of the problems with the default
Automake output is that it's very difficult, without redirecting output or
the assistance of a separate parsing program, to extract the warnings from
the long compiler strings.  This format makes the warnings *far* more
obvious, which is very useful.

The only thing that I'm worried about is not seeing the list of libraries
with which executables are linked.  That's the single piece of debugging
information about builds that I use the most often.

But the long, repetitive compiler lines, which are mechanically generated
and rarely contain useful information, get in the way of seeing bits of
output that are actually important.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>