Paint the Silence

Weee, long time, no blog.

Dear Lazyweb,

is it at all possible to coerce the devilspawn also known as libtool to actually be quiet when compiling and printing something like the kernel compilation outpout – that is, something like:

  GEN autogenerated.c
  CC file1.c
  CC file2.c
  LINK output
  INSTALL output

I know how to do that with a plain Makefile, and how to do it for autogenerated files like the enumeration types and the GLib marshallers, but I have no clue where to start to make libtool behave.

Thanks,
Emmanuele

11 Replies to “Paint the Silence”

  1. many thanks everyone for the link to pretty-am.

    I actually anted something like a m4 macro to ship with projects; will look at how pretty-am works and see if it can be used without patching automake directly instead.

  2. Please don’t do this. You are creating a debugging nightmare for some poor soul down the road, who has to figure out why a build of your software failed catastrophically, on an automated system (e.g. Debian buildd network) which provides only limited information (just the make output; no forensic examination of failed build directories possible) and offers no direct access. A simple error in CFLAGS turns into a multi-hour or multi-day ordeal if you hide the commands.

  3. @zack

    a “debugging nightmare”? I really can’t see why: the warnings and failures would still be reported as usual; the actual command line for compiling/generating/linking/installing a file would be the only think excised. it’s not like a >/dev/null 2>&1.

    and it would still be overridable anyway.

  4. just to be precise, I want something like:

       CC clutter-actor.c
       Warning: compilation failed because of ${FOO}
    

    which is already available in the kernel, git and all the new GNOME Perl bindings, as it makes the debugging output actually readable for the people who needs to read it (developers and packagers).

  5. I personnaly use pretty-am as well. Latest patch available works great (but has one little problem, some mv aren’t masked). I have to run a custom script to silent the extra libtool echo and thereafter compilation is all quieter and still shows errors like it should. A real pleasure to work with.

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