Hello, * Joakim Tjernlund wrote on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 09:05:07AM CET: > > Is there a reason why the install target doesn't respect make -s? > > I would really like to see autotools and libtool respect make -s. > When a developer asks for a silent build in order to catch problems > all one should see is real warnings and problems.
Just to address a few of the questions, suggestions, and inaccuracies mentioned in this thread. First off, `make -s' is both POSIX and portable. Conceptually, `make -s' has nothing to do with the `silent-rules' option that recent Automakes provide. The difference between `make -s' and make >/dev/null is that standard output from invoked commands and the one-line note about invoking make in a subdirectory is not filtered. For a long time (long long before silent-rules came along), some of the more complex rules generated by Automake would mostly operate silently, then echo part of their commands before executing them. Examples are most rules updated at `make install' time, the .texi.info rule, and others which are fairly complex. This is mostly helpful to users, as the exact install rules are hard to read; `make -n install' can let you appreciate all the ugliness. With these rules, automake follows a rough rule that it outputs the "interesting" command in a single line, with one space preceding it. So, one way to avoid seeing this stuff would be, e.g., make -s install | grep -v '^ [^ ]' If you additionally would like to not see output from libtool, pass LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent to make as well, or set it in your environment. Any remaining non-warning output from libtool (or warning output that shouldn't be warnings but notes) would be a bug you should report to bug-libtool. Thanks. There is another angle in this story. Enter the silent-rules option. It currently allows to enable silencing of libtool (yes, silent-rules will pass --silent as flag to libtool), of most compile, and link rules. It doesn't address make install/uninstall rules yet. I don't mind going that way; the primary reason not more rules exploited a silent mode for 1.11 was that we didn't want to delay the release further, and that compile rules were what bothered users most. Most install rules aren't that verbose anyway. Patches to this end are welcome, under the usual side conditions: non-trivial patches need copyright assignment, all new behavior needs full testsuite exposure, and so on. I might work on this eventually. Thanks, Ralf PS: And yes, 1.11.2 without silent-rules mode will return to have the exact output from before 1.11 (without the ugly additional empty line), we got that small regression fixed now.
