Re: silent build rules

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> * Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 09:32:54PM CEST:
> > My opinion is that if this mode is optional that it should default to
> > "off"
>
> It defaults to off.
>
> It is enabled if the *developer* (Makefile.am author) chooses so.
>
> I take it you suggest that it default to on only if *both* the developer
> and the user choose so?  I take it that, if we introduced an

Yes, of course.  The user should be in charge of building the package. 
Developers produce packages for users. Why should the developer care 
to restrict what the user sees?  The developer should be more 
concerned about what the developer sees.  The developer typically has 
different requirements than the package user.

> --enable-silent-rules switch to enable silent rules, and the developer
> then went ahead and added
>  : ${enable_silent_rules=yes}
>
> to the configure.ac file, effectively defaulting to silent rather than
> verbose, then you will still ask *Automake* to override this somehow?

If it is supported by Automake, then it seems like the capability 
should be available all the time (in all packages), defaulted to 
"off".  This way all packages (going forward) will offer similar build 
options. This should not be treated differently than the standard 
configure options described by the default INSTALL document.

Automake is supposed to be all about consistency and ensuring that the 
user has what they need to correctly build and install the software.

If automake changes its behavior, then all existing build wrapper 
scripts which capture a detailed log of the build will need to be 
modified in order to capture the build information which was collected 
before.

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