Re: [bug #40639] GNU Make with profiling information

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2013-12-15 at 13:38 +0000, Tim Murphy wrote:
> I suppose I'm skirting around saying that I think gnu make needs an
> output format in the same way that valgrind has "--xml=yes".  I'm not
> an XML fan really - JSON might be an alternative.

> It isn't your problem to provide such a mechanism and I realise it's
> unfair of me to give you any sort of hard time about it. This feature
> is just a small example of how gnu make will evolve an irregular
> output format that's not easy to change once its "finalised" because
> it's not designed to be extendable.

I'll quote my comment from the bug report in Savannah:

> Lastly, and this is where we may need to have more conversation, I'm not so
> excited about adding the formatting capability, at least not this way.  I
> think that it could be a very useful thing to allow for specially-formatted
> output from GNU make.  For example, perhaps an output format in XML that could
> be easily sucked into tools like Eclipse or whatever for further parsing (I'm
> not a huge fan of XML but it is relatively universal).  Now that we have the
> output sync capability it would be straightforward to combine these and format
> the output of recipes for proper XML encoding as well.
> 
> But I don't want to add multiple different formatting options, for different
> types of output.  I'd prefer to have one comprehensive formatting capability.

In other words, I prefer to take a page from Git, GDB, and other
projects where the default output is human readable but probably not
easily parsed by tools, and then provide a different output format
option that provides machine-parse-able formats.  I'm not interested in
trying to create one output format that solves both of those problems.

And, I think that this issue is completely separate from profiling and
we shouldn't bundle them.

On Sun, 2013-12-15 at 05:50:49 -0800, David Boyce wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Tim Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I'm not an XML fan really
> 
> Agree.
> 
> > JSON might be an alternative.
> 
> IMHO, YAML is to JSON what JSON is to XML

My concern with both YAML and JSON is they don't seemed well designed
(especially JSON) to handle large blocks of formatted text.  Any output
format from make would need to be able to represent both the the recipe
that was run as well as the complete output generated by that recipe.
That could be quite a lot of text indeed, and preserving the formatting
verbatim is crucial.

In fact, I would suspect that the output format from make would often be
much closer to a text markup format than to a data exchange format.

That said, I'm not much of a fan of XML either so I'm certainly open to
alternatives.

> (oh, and vim > emacs!).

Well, now you've just lost all credibility! :-p :-)