Re: [rfc] Colorized output for GNU make?

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 10/03/2011 08:20 PM, David Boyce wrote:
> I have two reactions to the original post:
> 
> 1. I hate colorized output in all its forms. If you want to add this
> feature and can get it in that's fine with me as long as it will never
> show up as a default in any native build of make.

Off-by-default works for me.


> 2. I don't know if you've used Electric Make, which is a commercial
> make which aims for 100% GNU make compatibility, but they've extended
> their variant to allow for XML-tagged output. From this they can
> generate graphs and charts and derive metrics and so on. So I think a
> more general solution would be to offer XML-style output as a GNU make
> option, and then it would be trivial to post-process that for
> colorizing as well as a number of other useful purposes. I can think
> of a small list of make output categories. Let's see:
> 
> <recipe>       command lines printed by make
> <verbosity>   other make output
> <debug>       the stuff printed with -d
> <db>            the stuff printed by make -p
> <info>           text from the $(info) function
> <error>,<warning>  as above
> ???
> 
> Anything not within one of the tags would be considered regular
> command output. If you were doing serial build, or parallel and had a
> synchronization feature such as in
> <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?33138>, then output could be nested
> inside the <recipe> tag from which it derived which would be more
> useful. I'm pretty sure ecmake does something like that. Anyway, I
> think that would have more general utility than colorization per se.

I see the versatility of that approach.  I do not want to involve it
with with colorization, though.

Best,



Sebastian