automake's silent-rules

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 06:35:31PM -0400, James Cloos wrote:
> Now that automake 1.11 has easy support for controling the verbosity of
> make, we should make that available.
> 
> Is there any preference for whether silent should be enabled or disabled
> by default?  Either way, one can override via the --enable-silent-rules
> and --disable-silent-rules configure flags or via make V=1 and make V=0,
> so this question is only relevant to those who configure and make w/o
> specifying a verbosity choice.
> 
> The first step is to add either of:
> 
>     m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES],[AM_SILENT_RULES([no])])
> 
> or:
> 
>     m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES],[AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])])
> 
> to configure.ac.

I'd rather have it into xorg-macros. See the patch below as a possible
solution to get it for 'free'.

> There is also a $(AM_V_GEN) which can be added as a prefix to
> Makefile.am command lines to control verbosity for commands which
> automake doesn't know about, such as the $(RAWCPP) commands in libX11.
> 
> But that can be done as a separate step, if desired.

this is also a reason to put it into the macros to avoid future duplication.

> Is there a consensus preference for or against make verbosity?

Definitely against make verbosity. (enable-silent-rules yes)

It's easy to miss warnings in between current output and I guess the number
of times one need to see warnings is significantly higher than the number of
times you need to see the exact command.
The move to shave by default in the server supports this as well.