Re: Reducing verbosity of automake

[Ralf Wildenhues]

[ I assume you want Cc:s to both addresses? ]

Hi Brendon,

* Brendon Costa wrote on Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 02:20:15PM CEST:
> 
> When compiling a project using: autoconf/automake/libtool, there is just
> too much data being output to the screen when i run the make command.

  make -s

or even

  make -s LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent

helps.[1]

> If one of the commands being executed sends anything to stderr like
> warnings or errors the user will see them, but if all is working fine,
> then you see just this clean looking summary of what is occurring in
> order to build the system. I.e. the stdout from each command is being
> piped to /dev/null but errors come through as normal.

Ah, even simpler:
  make >/dev/null

> The other thing it does is that if a command being executed returns an
> error (i.e. failed to compile or link etc) then the jam system will
> display the command line used.

Ah, for this, do
  make -s || make

> Is there currently any feature like this available in automake?

Just what I noted above.  (I know this isn't /quite/ what you want.)

> If not how difficult would it be for someone who does not have much
> experience yet with automake to add this sort of feature?

All patches I've seen add quite a bit of bloat to Makefile.in's, for
dubious value (remember the compile rules may be output very often with
per-target flags).  I always prefer to just use the filter available in
my editor: it swallows all output, shows it to me when I'd like it to do
so, and otherwise jumps to the first warning or error it could parse
from the log.  And yes, I happen to know that *both* editors have this
very useful feature.  ;-)

Another reason against such a patch is that, whenever a developer gets
a bug report, then usually the actual build output is useful, but the
abbreviated output you suggest is close to useless.

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] I know libtool isn't completely silent even with that.  I wrote a
while ago that I'd accept a patch against CVS HEAD silencing it with
`--silent --silent', or similarly, but that I have little incentive to
write one myself.  Did I hear somebody volunteer now?  ;-)