automake: Make verbosity
1
1 21.1 Make is verbose by default
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1
1 Normally, when executing the set of rules associated with a target,
1 ‘make’ prints each rule before it is executed. This behaviour, while
1 having been in place for a long time, and being even mandated by the
1 POSIX standard, starkly violates the “silence is golden” UNIX
1 principle(1):
1
1 When a program has nothing interesting or surprising to say, it
1 should say nothing. Well-behaved Unix programs do their jobs
1 unobtrusively, with a minimum of fuss and bother. Silence is
1 golden.
1
1 In fact, while such verbosity of ‘make’ can theoretically be useful
1 to track bugs and understand reasons of failures right away, it can also
1 hide warning and error messages from ‘make’-invoked tools, drowning them
1 in a flood of uninteresting and seldom useful messages, and thus
1 allowing them to go easily undetected.
1
1 This problem can be very annoying, especially for developers, who
1 usually know quite well what’s going on behind the scenes, and for whom
1 the verbose output from ‘make’ ends up being mostly noise that hampers
1 the easy detection of potentially important warning messages.
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1 ---------- Footnotes ----------
1
1 (1) See also <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s09.html>.
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