Re: Nice make output

[Jason But]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:07 pm, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 16:38 +1100, Jason But wrote:
> > From reading past posts, I gather that making the output of make nice is
> > a touchy subject.  While I accept that eveybody has opinion, my idea of a
> > nice Makefile is one which generates output something like
>
> <sigh> The quarterly flamebait </sigh>
>
> > ~me>make
> >     Compiling main.c
> >     Compiling foo.c
> >     Compiling bar.c
> >     Linking myprog
> > ~me>
>
> The primary audience of automake is developers. To them such kind of
> output is more or less sensefree.

I too am a developer and have been for twenty years and I consider the default 
output of running make to be completely useless, it tells me nothing of the 
process that I care about and fills my screen with garbage.  This might be 
useful when developing the Makefile and your make rules, but once that is 
sorted out is no longer useful at all.

Further, the final usage of automake is by people who aren't developers, the 
thousands (more) of Linux/BSD users out there who download Free Software and 
run the standard (./configure && make) scenario.  Surely if we want to be 
pushing the benefits of free software, we should try to less intimidate these 
people by generating output that tells them something about the process but 
doesn't fill the screen with gunk.

Another issue, compiler warnings.  With neat output, warning are spotted 
instantly and can be investigated.  With the current output warning all but 
dissapear into the sea of crap that fills the screen.
>
> > Suggestions? ideas? comments?
>
> Use
> make >/dev/null
> instead
>
And how would this help, then I get no feedback at all, very useful for 
projects which take 1hr+ to compile.
> Ralf