Re: FYI: fixing output of aclocal --verbose

[Pavel Roskin]

> But since it transmits the --verbnse to its slaves and its slaves are
> $verbosing on stderr, it should stay in stderr, so that messages
> remain in order.  A preferable solution for autoreconf, IMHO, but
> somewhat more painful that the current status, would be to have
> autoreconf redirect the verbose messages of the sub tools to stdout.
>
> Unfortunately, this would also mean redirect actually error messages
> from subtools to stdout, which doesn't sound right.

In fact, when I run "autoreconf --verbose" I only want to know what it's
running. I can hardly imagine that I'll ever really need the verbose
output of all tools in the same time.

If I know how exactly autoreconf is running automake, I'll rerun automake
with "--verbose".

My suggestion is that autoreconf should

1) print what it's calling by default (except the calls to autoconf
--trace and others that don't change files). No redirections.

2) don't print what it's calling with --quiet. No redirections.

3) when called with --verbose, propagate it, print what it's calling and
redirect all to stderr.

This would change the default behavior, but since the output of
autoreconf is intended mostly for humans, it shouldn't be an issue.

Regards,
Pavel Roskin