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Re: [rfc] Colorized output for GNU make?


From: David Boyce
Subject: Re: [rfc] Colorized output for GNU make?
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 14:20:28 -0400

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Tim Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have no decision making abilities so this comment is just an observation

Similarly, I'm just a bystander who should be doing real work.

> Whatever people decide to do, I'm interested in being able to parse
> the output of make when it's so long that you can't really look at it
> all with your eyes because it would take you a week. i.e. you need
> software that can summarise and extract interesting information from a
> huge quantity of output.

I have two reactions to the original post:

1. I hate colorized output in all its forms. If you want to add this
feature and can get it in that's fine with me as long as it will never
show up as a default in any native build of make.

2. I don't know if you've used Electric Make, which is a commercial
make which aims for 100% GNU make compatibility, but they've extended
their variant to allow for XML-tagged output. From this they can
generate graphs and charts and derive metrics and so on. So I think a
more general solution would be to offer XML-style output as a GNU make
option, and then it would be trivial to post-process that for
colorizing as well as a number of other useful purposes. I can think
of a small list of make output categories. Let's see:

<recipe>       command lines printed by make
<verbosity>   other make output
<debug>       the stuff printed with -d
<db>            the stuff printed by make -p
<info>           text from the $(info) function
<error>,<warning>  as above
???

Anything not within one of the tags would be considered regular
command output. If you were doing serial build, or parallel and had a
synchronization feature such as in
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?33138>, then output could be nested
inside the <recipe> tag from which it derived which would be more
useful. I'm pretty sure ecmake does something like that. Anyway, I
think that would have more general utility than colorization per se.

-David Boyce



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