Re: [Automake-NG] Automake vs. Automake-NG

[Russ Allbery]

Diego Elio Pettenò <address@hidden> writes:
> On 21/08/2012 09:47, Eric Blake wrote:

>> The 'silent-rules' change in automake change did NOT make more builds
>> instantly silent, nor are we preventing you from your goal of noisy
>> builds for the Fedora buildbots.

> That being the case I retire my note as well — although it seems like
> most upstreams just decide to enable silent rules for good when they do.

Yes, but I (speaking as another distro maintainer) think that's a problem
with the upstreams that do that, rather than a problem with Automake in
how it offers the functionality.  The upstreams just require some
education around how distros use unattended build logs to diagnose
problems!

Automake's manual already says:

|    Note that silent rules are _disabled_ by default; the user must
| enable them explicitly at either `configure' run time or at `make' run
| time.  We think that this is a good policy, since it provides the
| casual user with enough information to prepare a good bug report in
| case anything breaks.
| 
|    Still, notwithstanding the rationales above, a developer who wants to
| make silent rules enabled by default in his own package can do so by
| adding a `yes' argument to the `AM_SILENT_RULES' call in
| `configure.ac'.  We advise against this approach, though.
| 
|    Users who prefer to have silent rules enabled by default can edit
| their `config.site' file to make the variable `enable_silent_rules'
| default to `yes'.  This should still allow disabling silent rules at
| `configure' time and at `make' time.

so if upstream would just read the manual of the build software they're
using, this mostly isn't a problem.  (That said, it might be worth adding
something to this section talking about how Linux distributors need to
have silent rules be disabled by default as well, in case people are
reading the bit about "casual user" and going "well, my package doesn't
have any casual users, so I don't care.")

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>