Re: patch to support output synchronization under -j

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:43:53 +0100
> From: Tim Murphy <address@hidden>
> Cc: David Boyce <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> I think it's an inevitable consequence that if you have a long-running
> task then the output from it won't appear until it has completely
> finished and you won't be able to watch the progress - in this scheme
> there is no way to show "some" of the output whilst also ensuring that
> it is not interspersed with output from other recipes.

Well, if that's so, then this feature will be less useful than it
could be, at least for me.  It reminds me of my DOS days, when running
a compilation command from Emacs would show me the output only when
the compiler was done.  I'm not happy to return to those "compiling
blind" days.  Can something be done to alleviate this?

Btw, there will be other side effects, at least on non-Posix
platforms, due to the fact that stuff that was supposed to go to the
screen is redirected to a file instead.  Some programs sense that and
behave differently, e.g. with binary non-printable characters or with
special character sequences.  By redirecting the output to files, then
displaying it on the screen, the output may look strangely, or have
some more grave effect, like terminating output prematurely.  We
should consider these potential problems, and in any case the simple
loop that reads from temporary files and writes to stdout/stderr may
need to become much more complicated, at least on DOS/Windows.  (I
believe similar, though less serious, problems could happen on Unix as
well.)