Re: Make, MAKE_TERMOUT, color escape sequences, TTYs, and PTYs

[Josh Triplett]

On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 11:04:49AM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Sat, 2016-05-28 at 16:09 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > If make's own stdout/stderr refers to a PTY, make could create PTYs in
> > place of pipes, collect output that way, and synchronize it to its own
> > stdout/stderr as it does now.
> 
> Just for clarity: GNU make doesn't use pipes to collect output, it uses
> IO redirection to temporary files.
> 
> I don't see any serious issue with this proposal, as long as it's
> appropriately managed for portability.

Understood.  I'll take care to include appropriate checks in configure
to only do this on systems with the necessary functions.

In order to collect output via a pty, make will need to continuously
read data from the pty and write it out to the temporary file.  I was
thinking of doing so either by forking an extra process to do the
copying when launching a command, or by having the parent process do
this for all commands it runs as part of its pselect loop.  Does one of
those seem reasonable?

- Josh Triplett