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

[Jim Meyering]

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].
>
> WDYT?

Yes, I think that would be an improvement for interactive use,
but changing the default might be problematic for build systems
that expect "make" to print a full log of the commands that it runs.
They'd have to know to use V=1 with an automake-ng-using project.

On the other hand, such systems already have to do that with
projects like coreutils, diffutils, grep, gzip, parted, idutils,
vc-dwim and cppi that enable automake's silent-rules feature.