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Re: Reducing verbosity of automake
From: |
Christopher S Morrison |
Subject: |
Re: Reducing verbosity of automake |
Date: |
Thu, 25 May 2006 04:29:58 -0700 |
Howdy Ralf,
I so sometimes instruct them to do that, usually when helping people
interactively, and I get mixed results. Some get it right and I get a
condensed log, some actually don't and I end up spending even more time trying
to figure out what went wrong on their end (typos, misunderstandings,
additional questions, etc).
You can chaulk that up to "dumb users" but that's somewhat unfair in my opinion
as there is additional complexity, albeit minimal, and hence potential for even
careless mistakes. Either way, it does happen from time to time and when it
does, it ends up being more of a burden on both my end and their end.
Personally, I'd rather the burden be on my end while still giving as much of a
"clean build" experience to my external compiling users as possible (within the
reason and limitations of the build system tools, of course).
Moreover, even when there is nothing at all wrong, I even appreciate and like
the simple one-line build progress status output that you don't get during the
two-phase silent make. Also, users don't have to stop two makes if they want
to abort the build -- minor detail, but annoying nonetheless (sure I can
bootstrap a build script and abort that instead).
I'm not really complaining about the massive logs even if it might sound like
it. It is the safest, simplest, and most informative route given the current
build system capabilities. Just having seen the rather neat and organized
output of different systems makes one yearn for improvement.
Sure my commodity Toyota build system might get me there and do a fine job at
it reliably, but I can certainly appreciate and want the better German
engineering features in a BMW build system too. Turning the air conditioner
off and rolling down the windows in the Toyota might make problems easier to
diagnose, but people simply aren't used to that unless they're a mechanic
regardless of what the owner's manual might dictate. If a nice heads up
display that neatly tells them what the problem is regardless of their usage or
situation can be provided like found on the BMW by a AM_CC_FILTER or somesuch,
even better. ;-)
Cheers!
Sean
On Thursday, May 25, 2006, at 01:59AM, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
>Hi Sean,
>
>* Christopher Sean Morrison wrote on Sat, May 20, 2006 at 07:26:39PM CEST:
>>
>> Usually, the problem from a purely practical standpoint is that the
>> error is rarely at the very end, it's somewhere probably in the last
>> 50-200 lines or so of the output depending on the situation. So they
>> either send me the entire massive log (because all things being
>> equal, that's the safest thing for me to instruct of them) or they
>> send me only the very last 2-3 lines that say Error, which is almost
>> always useless.
>
>So why don't you instruct them to send the complete output of
> make -s LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent || make
>
>which should at least increase the signal to noise ratio somewhat.
>
>Cheers,
>Ralf