Re: [PATCH] build: use automake's --silent-rules option when possible

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> >  CC  id.o
> Now your users won't see the "silent bugs" your package comes with.
>
> I am seriously asking: Why are you doing this? To me, such "silence" means 
> cheating at one selves about the quality of a package and "playing down" the 
> bugs a package is suffering from.

I would hate for Ralf to think that he is all by his lonesome ... :-)

While as application developers/maintainers we experience the build 
output from our package each and every day, end users (or intermediate 
maintainers) only see the build output when they go out of their way 
to build our package.  While our build environments are carefully 
perfected, the end user's environment is likely to be more dangerous, 
with multiple variants of the same libraries installed in different 
places on the system.  Even a successful build may not be the build 
the user wanted.  A very quiet build is basically saying "trust us" 
but how can they trust us when we don't know how their system is put 
together or the user's ultimate objective?  For this reason it makes 
more sense to be sufficiently noisy for the default "end user" build 
and very quiet for the perfected maintainer build.

By sufficiently noisy I mean that the user should be able to see the 
preprocessor and library search paths and any defines provided via the 
command line so they can be sure that the right bits are being used.

We can suggest using "make V=1" but end users are most likely to 
execute './configure', 'make', 'make install' without reading most of 
the package install documentation.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/