[bug #40639] GNU Make with profiling information

[Paul D. Smith]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #40639 (project make):

Hi Eddy; thanks for your interest in improving GNU make!  I think the idea of
providing more statistics for builds is very interesting.  While I agree it
could be done externally (for example, by setting the SHELL variable to a
command that would track the time spent) this could also have detrimental
impacts (for example by setting SHELL you disable the fast-path ability of GNU
make to directly fork/exec simple commands, without a shell).  You're also
adding an extra fork/exec step into each command.

I have a few things to mention, however.  First, the code as you have it won't
work on all platforms; in particular it won't work on Windows as Windows
doesn't (by default) provide a gettimeofday() function.  There are various
implementations around, so this isn't a huge issue.

Second, as written your patch is large enough that applying it would require
copyright assignment of the changes by you to the FSF.  If you're interested
in pursuing this email me directly and we'll discuss the details.

Third, I'm not sure about some things: for example, why use doubles when we're
talking about integral values?  Actually GNU make has support for building on
systems which don't even support floating point, so it's best to avoid
doubles.

Lastly, and this is where we may need to have more conversation, I'm not so
excited about adding the formatting capability, at least not this way.  I
think that it could be a very useful thing to allow for specially-formatted
output from GNU make.  For example, perhaps an output format in XML that could
be easily sucked into tools like Eclipse or whatever for further parsing (I'm
not a huge fan of XML but it is relatively universal).  Now that we have the
output sync capability it would be straightforward to combine these and format
the output of recipes for proper XML encoding as well.

But I don't want to add multiple different formatting options, for different
types of output.  I'd prefer to have one comprehensive formatting capability.

So what I'd prefer is to split it so that this change deals solely with the
profile information, and (if requested) will print it out in a standard
(predefined) format.

Then at some future time someone can look into providing an output formatting
definition capability for GNU make.

What do you think about this idea?  It may require some post-processing via
sed, or whatever, to get the format needed for various purposes.

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