Re: make --silent

[tristan van berkom gmail com]

On 2012-09-09, at 2:35 AM, Lanoxx <lanoxx gmx net> wrote:

> Hi Colin,
> 
> can you give me a concrete example of some output where the silent switch is actually problematic? For every occasion where I have used it so far, it only removed lines which look like
> 
> make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/user/Documents/Code/tilda'
> 


This is generally useful to pinpoint the directory where something went wrong in the case that you are searching in a verbose make output.

When for example, you build the whole platform from scratch... It's a long process... Maybe one build fails because 3 packages ago a package was badly configured.

When something goes wrong you need all the output... what if you need to know that the correct flags are given to the linker? What if you are pulling the pkg-config from /usr/bin instead of from your cross compiling environment ?

Many things can go wrong when building entire stacks, so all output is needed. when you build one package as a developer, you are one of the use cases of build scripts which (sometimes) require less output... Of course if something goes dramatically wrong even you will end up enabling the complete output...

Cheers


> and I don't understand how that can lhelp people who run build servers? On the other hand, how many people (e.g. developers) need to compile some code by hand and how many people are there running build servers? I could be wrong of course, but wouldn't it be easier to set the silent option as default and then let the people with build servers export some variable such that the silent option is ignored? Im not very familiar with autotools but it should be possible to do something like this:
> 
> if not environment.SILENT_MAKE_FLAG then;
>  MAKEFLAGS = -s
> fi
> 
> and then everyone who runs a build server can just export SILENT_MAKE_FLAG. Or is that a stupid idea for some reason?
> 
> On 08/09/12 19:12, Colin Walters wrote:
>> On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 19:06 +0200, Lanoxx wrote:
>> 
>>> 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.
>> Because people running build servers want the complete verbose logs in
>> order to debug problems.
>> 
>> It's easy enough to filter the output; we should really patch jhbuild to
>> do so.  It's just hard to do in the curent code.
>> 
>> 
> 
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