Re: verbosity

[Christopher Sean Morrison]

Counterproductive presumptuous flamings aside, there are compelling  
arguments on both sides of the issue for having or quelling verbose  
compilation output.  Depending on at least the development  
environment, requirements, expectations, and values of the  
developers, I've been in situations where I've needed the default to  
be one versus the other for both cases.  Arguing to only have verbose  
or to only have silent is, imho, 'ignorant religion' with disregard  
to those other environments.  Practically as self-defeating as having  
religion on a particular software language -- they all serve a  
purpose and have value in particular situations.

The point that seems to be repeatedly get made (I mean seriously, how  
many times a year does this question come up?) is to merely provide a  
means to make one vs the other the *default*, and not some absurd  
shell redirect.  It's "absurd" because it doesn't provide what they  
asked for in the first place -- default behavior from their build  
system in an integration fashion (as opposed to some shell scripted  
or makefile wrapper hack).  Adding the libtool silent flag or using  
the make silent option can help, but they comprehensively also do not  
provide what folks asked for in the first place either..

Most users appreciate it when things just work under expected default  
use, and the developers of course appreciate when there is minimal  
effort required on their part to set up that default configuration.   
If someone is even willing to take the time and effort and provide  
the modification/option for a silent or otherwise minimally verbose  
build, more power to them as it serves everyone's interest.   You can  
get bit by having a compilation be too silent or by drowning the  
compiling users with detail.  Having that option (e.g. as configure  
macro directives that autoconf, automake, and libtool consistently  
obey) doesn't mean everyone will have to use it, and could even be  
overridden at run-time regardless of the default a particular project  
seemed to prefer.

Cheers!
Sean