Re: [Automake-ng] Activating support for silent-rules unconditionally?

[Eric Blake]

On 04/16/2012 11:57 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> Right now, in mainstream Automake, support for silent rules is optional
> and activated only if the 'silent-rules' option is specified.
> 
> I think the rationale behind this is the that the silent-rules machinery
> originally [1] only worked with make implementations supporteing nested
> variables expansions, which wasn't a POSIX-specified features, so that
> packages wanting to be "extra-portable" couldn't use the silent-rules
> support.
> 
> But since Automake-NG only targets GNU make, and since silent rules are
> disabled by default even when the 'silent-rules' option is given [2], I
> think it would now be simpler to have support for silent rules always
> enabled [3].

I definitely agree that now that silent-rules support is
POSIX-compliant, there is no drawback to always building a Makefile that
will support silent rules.

I also argue that it should still be up to the package which side of the
fence their default should be (that is, we shouldn't be forcing silent
builds on packages that like noise, nor forcing noisy builds on packages
that like silence, as their default).  Of course, the end user is always
right, and can override the package defaults either at configure time or
with make V=[01].

And I think your patch is exactly on track - the 'silent-rules' option
existed to control whether or not Makefile supported silent rules, and
not whether the resulting Makefile defaulted to a particular state of
silence, with additional effort being required to set the per-package
default choice of whether to be silent or noisy without further user
input.  Now that our Makefiles with silent rules are portable, there is
no need to avoid the silent rules framework in generated Makefiles.  I'm
in favor of this patch, perhaps even for mainline Automake.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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