RFC: Patches to enhance automake support for silent-rules

[Darren Garvey]

Hi all,

In order to make automake builds quieter when building with the
"silent-rules" option, I made some patches that do this. Before spending
the time figuring out how to write tests for these I would like to see if
there was any interest in doing this.

The patches are up on my github account [1] - based on current master - for
anyone to try out. I split the commits up into some prerequisites and
obvious things, such as suppressing all of the "mkdir -p" commands that are
printed currently even during "quiet" builds. The rest primarily changes
the output of the generated install targets to print as little as possible.

I've tried this against a large code base and IMHO the output is much
improved for building C, C++, Python and Java. Verbose build output is left
untouched (in theory), but "quiet" output for install rules now looks like:

    INSTALL /install/location/of/foo
    INSTALL /other/install/location/of/bar

I've not gone to any great lengths yet to sanitise the patches for fear of
there not being any appetite to accept patches (the git repo hasn't changed
in a good while), so this is an RFC on the idea and the approach.

Note: I don't know automake internals and am only a casual user. I
purposely didn't go around changing things that I couldn't see as making
any difference on the codebase I'm building so there are likely some holes.

Cheers,
Darren

P.S. Turns out I already posted about this when I originally looked at
hacking something like this together a while ago [2].

[1] https://github.com/darrengarvey/automake
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2013-06/msg00022.html