Re: [bug #40639] GNU Make with profiling information

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 11:58 +0200, Eddy Petrișor wrote:
> > I understand the interest in the amount of time a given job takes to
> > run, but I guess I don't understand the need for a "start time
> offset"
> > at all.  Isn't it sufficient to record the start time of a job, then
> > when it's complete show the elapsed time for that job?  Or recipe?
>  Or
> > both?
> 
> The resulted information when using absolute time stamps is almost
> meaningless until they are further processed in an external tool
> because is hard to identify with a glance which job finished last,
> which first and so on.
> 
> If a relative time stamp is provided one can waste less time on the
> analysis when some target is clearly the wasteful one. Also the
> relative time stamps generate very readable graphs directly after
> insertion in a tool such as Oocalc, Gnumeric or Excel. With absolute
> time stamps the very first thing I found myself doing was to generate
> relative time stamps.

Sorry, I was not clear: I wasn't suggesting that it would be better to
display the absolute time for the start time.  I was wondering why we
display the start time at all.  Why not just show the elapsed time, and
nothing else?  That would avoid all of these issues.

However Tim makes a reasonable point in his response so if it can be
done without too much difficulty it would be good to show a relative
start time.