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

[Dave Hart]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 19:16, Bob Friesenhahn
<address@hidden> wrote:
> The naive user won't know anything about silent output.  Maintainers of
> packages which are configured to deliver silent output by default will then
> suffer with insufficient information provided in user bug reports, followed
> by an attempt at more discussion (often futile) to request building with
> verbosity enabled.  Users who understand build error messages but not the
> silent output mechanism will be frustrated that they can't debug their
> build.
>
> Maintainers, package preparers, and the technically savvy, will know about
> how to enable silent output, so they will request it when they want it and
> so life will be grand.
>
> This is why I continue to believe that traditional make verbose output
> should be the default.
>
> We can only hope that maintainers do not assert a silent-only build.

ntpd in the ntp-dev branch switched to defaulting to make V=0 15
months ago, and so far there has been very little pain as a result.  I
believe we've had to ask for "make V=1" output two times or less.  We
do hedge a bit with a manual compile rule for version.c in most
directories which doesn't honor silence -- so there is a single
verbose compiler invocation scattered among the quiet CC target.o
lines.

Overall, it's much more common for me to need to ask for config.h
and/or config.log than to ask for a rebuild with V=1.  V=0 output is
just overwhelming, literally too much information the vast majority of
the time.

I don't claim every project will have a similar experience, but I do
dispute the notion that defaulting to silence is sure to cause pain
all around.

Cheers,
Dave Hart