Re: [RFC/PATCH] m4: enable silent build rules by default

[Mike Frysinger]

On 08 Dec 2021 15:02, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Please don't *ever* make this change.
> 
> I agree with Zack, and just for CI purposes; it is simply too big of an
> incompatibility to inflict at this late date.

there's nothing incompatible about it.  the inputs to the system (how
configure & make are invoked) are the same, as are the outputs (the
artifacts created by `make install`).

yes, humans by default would see different things in logs, but i wouldn't
call that an incompatibility.

i don't think we should be afraid of making changes that have user-visible
changes.  if we want to be cautious about how it gets staged out, that's
fine, but we need to figure out a way of pulling this off.  if automake
hesitates to innovate, then only users suffer.

> P.S. Personally, I am no fan of silent builds.

the Automake manual disagrees with this.
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Silencing-Make

i tend to agree with the points it makes, including from experience.
pages of spew make it easy for new warnings to slip in unnoticed, and
developers are less inclined to improve things when it's also pages of
spew they never look at.

> I find that inevitably I need to debug a build at some point and any
> debugging is greatly impaired by the silence.

i think this is focusing on the uncommon flow.  i suspect more people
focus on the files being compiled on a day-to-day basis.

> And it is not necessarily easy to completely
> undo it (make V=1 does not do everything, in my experience.) Anyway ...

are you talking in general, or for automake specifically ?  i'm not aware
of any such bugs in automake.  if you've seen any, shouldn't there be a
bug report about it so it can get fixed ?  if it's buggy, then it's a
problem already for people who have opted in to silent builds.

what i have seen is hardcoded use of @ independent of silent builds, both
in automake and in other projects.  the V= setting wouldn't help with those.
maybe you're thinking of that ?
-mike

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