[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] shorten make output

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 17:45 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> Evgeniy Stepanov wrote:
> > this patch makes build output much shorter and, IMO, more pleasant to
> > the eye. Instead of long gcc command lines only 'CC filename' or
> > 'LINK filename' is printed. The idea and the implementation are taken
> > from linux kernel build system. It can be turned off with 'make V=1'.
> 
> I hate that feature of the Linux kernel build system; it's kind of nice
> in theory, and makes no difference when everything goes right, but when
> things are going wrong (or just when you're curious) it would be nice to
> see exactly what the commands are, and I've never before heard of a way
> to do that.
> 
> If in fact the "V=1" approach would work the same way with the kernel,
> then that's good to know, but I"m still not sure I like the idea of
> extending this practice to other projects.
> 
> Would there be any problem with having this available but disabled by
> default - or, at least, settable via a configure option?

Of course it's important to be able to see the exact command for
debugging, but that doesn't mean it should be shown by default. When you
have command lines like

gcc-4.3 -I. -Iffmpeg -Wdisabled-optimization -Wno-pointer-sign -Wall
-Wno-switch -Wpointer-arith -Wredundant-decls -O4 -march=native
-mtune=native -pipe -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -D_REENTRANT
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
-DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I/usr/include/SDL  -D_REENTRANT
-I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include   -c -o mplayer.o mplayer.c

where the part outside "mplayer.o mplayer.c" stays the same repeatedly
showing it again for every compilation command hides more interesting
output.

> IMO this approach makes the output, not "beautiful", but
> "clueless-user-friendly" - and as such I find it annoying much of the
> time. I'm not a clueless user, I don't appreciate being treated as one,
> and I should not have to specify some obscure option to a nice clean
> one-word command in order to avoid being treated as one.

I think this is something of a strawman argument (though you probably
didn't intend it as one). Why do you think verbosity levels in general
exist? For clueless users only? I think this is good for my own use.
Evgeniy's original mail also talked about developer use, not less
clueful users. In fact all the people who have supported this so far
have been even less "clueless users" than yourself, and nobody has said
this would be done for the benefit of those clueless users.