Re: yet another patch to reduce make output

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Jason Kraftcheck wrote on Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 03:43:00PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > * Jason Kraftcheck wrote on Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 11:36:55PM CET:
> >> This patch prefixes the compile and link commands in the generated
> >> Makefile's with $(AM_PFX).
[...]
> > What's the improvement over
> >   AM_MAKEFLAGS = -s
> 
> It can be set by the configure script so that it affects even the
> top-level make invocation.

Yes.  With current Automake that will typically avoid exactly one line
of output:
| make -s all-am

or:
| make all-recursive

(I guess you knew that you can set it at configure time as well by
something like `AC_SUBST([AM_MAKEFLAGS], ["-s"])'.

> I'm not sure how portable the -s flag is.

It's POSIX.  All `make' implementations I know have -s, which shuts them
up more or less (e.g., GNU make still prints one line per makefile).

> > except for that this only works starting from the second level 'make'
> > invocation, and why does the patch silence the usual compile/link
> > commands for programs and libraries but not for, say, texinfo output?
> 
> There's no reason it couldn't be done for texinfos and other things also.
>  I wasn't sure if it would be useful, so I didn't add it.

OK.

> How likely is
> it that the build command for texinfo stuff will exceed a line or two?

Very likely if the command is generated by Automake and thus comes from
automake/lib/am/texibuild.am.  But I took this only as an example, there
are other things Automake can build and I wanted to clarify whether your
patch is merely partial or treating things differently on purpose (e.g.,
you only want to silence C/C++/F77 compilation and linking, but not any
other build commands).

Cheers,
Ralf