Re: Automake vs. Automake-NG

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 08/21/2012 06:30 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 08/21/2012 06:01 PM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>
>>>> Ok.  So the question I'd like you to ask yourself are:
> 
>>>> This needs to be done for each NG-NEWS items.  It could improve the
>>>> existing users of Automake, and reduce the size of NG-NEWS.  Both of
>>>> which are good things!
>>>>
>>> And I've done that already where possible and reasonable.  For example,
>>> the 'silent-rules' option is now active by default, and the tags-related
>>> rules have been reworked and improved.
> 
> Well, from a distro maintainer's view this a bad idea.
> 
> In Fedora we already are pushing around package maintainers to pass
> appropriate options to configure to revert this change, because silent
> make rules are non-suitable for building distros in batch jobs.
>
Please try at least to understand the features you are criticizing.

The use of 'silent-rules' (even now that is implicit) *don't* cause
the make output to become more silent* by default*.  For that, the
maintainer has to call 'AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])' *explicitly* in
configure.ac (and the automake manual even advise against it IIRC).
The only change is that the *user* will be allowed to *require* a
more quiet output from make if he wants to (at least for the Automake
provided recipes), without the package maintainer being forced to
cater to that.  That's all.

That has been explained to you few times already in the past, unless
I'm mistaken (and I doubt I am in this case).

> Making it the default in all automake-ng based packages, would escalate
> this already unpleasant situation.
>
It will be the default in Automake 1.13 already.  But the packages
whose output was verbose by default before will still have it that
way, without *any* need of extra tweaking or tinkering.

>>>> But CMake is not almost the same as Automake, Automake-NG is.
>>>> Automake-NG is not Automake 2.0,
>
> In other words, it is a fork with a backward incompatible API,
> a probably backward-incompatible runtime environment and a different
> target audience.
> 
> Somewhat exaggerated: Yet another tool the world has not been
> waiting for.
>
Yet more demoralizing, a-priori criticism.  Seriously, what are you
hoping to obtain with it?

Stefano