an update to automake-1.11?

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Jul 1 22:38:12 UTC 2009


Jim Meyering wrote:
> The silent-rules option makes it so build output by default
> no longer includes many compile/link/etc command invocations.
> Instead, you get very brief lines like these:
> 
>   ...
>   CC     tee.o
[etc.]

FWIW, that's what CMake does by default. (CMake's implementation is better
though: it also gives the progress percentage and uses color-coding so you
can immediately recognize the different kinds of operations and so the
operations are visually separated from the stderr output.) It is frowned
upon in Fedora because it doesn't allow you to easily check that
RPM_OPT_FLAGS are being used and so our %cmake and %cmake_kde4 macros
include:
-DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON
which overrides this behavior and shows the full command lines by default.
(It's also possible for CMake-using packages to do this at make time with
make VERBOSE=ON which is what was the previous recommendation.)

> Run "make V=1" if you want the verbose output you're used to.

This will be REQUIRED in Fedora for packages using this feature (unless this
can somehow be set at configure time, in which case our %configure macro
could do it similarly to how our %cmake and %cmake_kde4 macros do).

By the way, it's pretty sad that automake had to reinvent the wheel instead
of using the established VERBOSE=ON syntax.

> That may look trivial, but the reduced clutter makes surprising output
> stand out more than it used to. 

I agree (and I like how this has been the default in CMake since forever),
but we were told that this is no good for Fedora because we should have the
full command lines in build.log so we can check for the optflags.

        Kevin Kofler




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