Re: Some serious issues with the new -O option

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2013-05-03 at 15:22 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > The issue of how -Otarget handles recursive make is, IMO, a detail
> > necessitated by the architecture of recursive make invocations.  I don't
> > know that it's feasible to reflect that detail in the name.
> 
> It is a detail that IMO significantly qualifies the "target" part.  In
> particular, targets that include little or nothing except a recursive
> invocations will be entirely exempt from this "target" scope.

Personally I think it would be MORE confusing if you requested -Otarget
and the output for many or even all the targets in your build was not
printed until the build finished.  You're concentrating on the one
recursive make target and saying "this doesn't follow the rule", while
I'm concentrating on all targets in the sub-make and saying "let's make
sure all of these follow the rule" (that their output is shown as soon
as that target is complete).  Recursive make targets are merely
artifacts of the build.  Users don't care about them; they're just used
by makefile authors to organize things.  If the makefile author rewrote
the makefiles to be non-recursive, users wouldn't notice at all.

Anyway that's how I look at it.

Anyway.  I'm happy to entertain naming suggestions that try to capture
this exceptional treatment of recursive make but I have no ideas myself.