Re: make --silent

[Maciej Piechotka <uzytkownik2 gmail com>]

On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 19:06 +0200, Lanoxx wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I would like to hear some opinions about why the -s (--silent) option of 
> make is not being used more often in projects? I just updated the 
> configure.ac and Makefile.am files of a project I was working on and I 
> made these two changes:
> 
> configure.ac:
> m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES],[AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])])
> 
> Makefile.am:
> MAKEFLAGS=-s
> 
> The make output before I made these changes was 53 lines long (but 
> because of long lines it was wrapped into 115 lines on my screen), with 
> huge blocks of text, that were difficult to understand. Warnings in the 
> code were scrambled in between all these lines, and were difficult to be 
> spotted. Then I added the line in configure.ac and the output reduced to 
> 41 lines which didn't need to be wrapped, but there were a lot of 
> annoying lines like:
> 
> make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/.../Documents/Code/tilda/m4'
> 
> And then I added the line in Makefile.am and the output reduced to only 
> 28 (short) lines. In my opinion this has the clear advantage that I can 
> now spot all the warnings and errors in the code very easily, see the 
> example below.
> 
> I tried to ask in #gtk+ why they are using the SILENT_RULES makro, but 
> are not using the silent make flag, and someone tried to explain to me, 
> that this also silences warnings, but as can be seen below, it does not. 
> I also dont see a real benefit in these make output which only seems to 
> output which folders make is entering.
> 
> Maybe someone can give me more information about this?
> 
> Kind regards
> Lanoxx
> 
> (...)


Sorry if it looks like rant - it's more of confusion. Why people want to
have silent output for users?

Either:
 - Person compiling is developer. In this case compiling with -Wextra
-O1 -Werror should not be uncommon (and it makes the warnings very
visible). In most cases I guess that if they prefer to have silent
output they know how to change it.
 - Person compiling is source distribution user. In such case either
everything went all right (in which case he might not even see the log)
or not (in those cases very often the problem might be differences
between paths etc. so verbose output is useful)
 - (Person 'compiling' is binary distribution user in which he doesn't
compile)
 - Person compiling uses jhbuild. I have no idea what the needs are but
I presume that redirection output to log and just display 'compiling...'
etc can be the correct way.

In any case - people who care the most would be the one who have the
most knowledge to just change it locally (say use -s flag).

Best regards