Re: silent-rules

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > > > What work does it cause except for using --disable-silent-rules at
> > > > > configure time or V=1 at make time?
> > > > Exactly this is the problem.
>
> I still fail to understand.  What problem do you have with either
>  echo export V=1 >> ~/.bashrc
>
> or
>  echo enable_silent_rules=no >> ${CONFIG_SITE-/usr/local/share/config.site}
>
> once on your distro build daemon and be done with it?
>
> This is still a serious question, and I haven't seen anything in 
> your replies that answers it.  Yes, it may be pushing around distro 
> maintainers, but it's more of a gentle nudge than anything else if 
> you ask me.

It is interesting that Ralf Corsepius is encountering issues with 
building distribution RPMs since building distribution RPMs is done in 
a very well managed and controlled environment.  Sometimes it is done 
in a chrooted environment, or in a virtual machine created just for 
that task.  Care is taken to ensure that user and customized system 
environments are not part of the build equation.  The situation is far 
less constrained for source-based operating environments such as 
Gentoo and FreeBSD Ports, and definitely for end users who manually 
download, configure, and build.  FreeBSD Ports has over 20K packages 
to worry about now and port maintainers are not always as active as 
they need to be.

> Complaining alone won't change the situation, unless we also find 
> ways to improve things.  Going back isn't an option, for several 
> reasons, so let's see how to best go forward.

Actually, complaining can indeed change the situation.  I encourage 
anyone and everyone to complain stridently to whoever is making the 
decision to enable silent build by default (which is a very selfish 
sort of decision).  With enough back-pressure from the masses, this 
simple boolean can be toggled to the legacy default used since the 
dawn of GNU.  Open source is for users and the users have a right to 
complain to developers and maintainers.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/