Re: [rfc] Colorized output for GNU make?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> CC: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 17:32:50 -0500
> 
> On Thu, 2012-01-05 at 22:42 +0100, Sebastian Pipping wrote:
> > On 01/05/2012 09:46 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > The easiest way of abstracting this is to have a function that turns
> > > on a given color, and another function that turns off a color and
> > > returns to the default color.  ("Color" can actually be some other
> > > attribute, like bold or blinking.)  There should be a way to do this
> > > separately for foreground and background colors.
> > 
> > Is this about the extraction of two functions of three lines each or is
> > it about more?
> 
> It seems like we have two distinct things going on.  The first one is
> creating a common infrastructure for formatting messages, so we can
> generate a single string to be printed: that's the prefix stuff etc.
> 
> The second one is the colorized output itself: both the command line
> settings, as well as ultimately turning on/off colors.

Indeed.

> Maybe a way forward would be to take the code that formats the messages
> into a string and move that code into misc.c or similar.  That's generic
> and not related to colorizing.  Then have a function that took a message
> string (constructed by the formatting function probably?), and some
> details about the kind of attributes to use, and put that function in a
> file like "output_ascii.c" or something with a well-defined interface,
> so other files like "output_ncurses.c" or whatever could be written to
> that same interface and dropped in.
> 
> There might have to be some kind of handshake between the generic code
> and the colorized code for verifying command line arguments that set
> attributes, so the colorizing code can reject things it doesn't
> understand for example.
> 
> Does that make sense?

To me, it does.  A lot.

Thanks.