-V, --verbose, as opposite of -s, --silent, --quiet

[Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)]

Hi,

I'd like a project to use '--silent' by default, to have readable 
output, and hide most of the full commands, which would be too noisy. 
So, ideally, I'd like to have 'MAKEFLAGS += --silent' in the Makefile.

The output would be something like:

CC      foo.o
CC      bar.o
...

But then, if something goes wrong (e.g., bar.c stops compiling into 
bar.o), I'd like to be able to debug the build by showing the full command.

Ideally, that would imply editing the command line, since that is a 
temporary change that will affect a single execution, not most of them. 
 But there's no such option in GNU Make.  Maybe a new '--verbose' 
option that overrides a previous '--silent' would be nice.

I could edit the Makefile to comment out '--silent', but that forces 
recompiling the whole project, which is not nice at all.

Or I could workaround the status quo by not having '--silent' in the 
Makefile, and then specify it in every command line invocation, but that 
is cumbersome.  Or yet another workaround could be inventing a variable 
that specifies the level of verbosity that I want, and default to @, as 
the kernel does, but it is a lot of unnecessary complexity, IMO.

Could you please consider adding such an option to GNU Make?

Thanks,

Alex


--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/