From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NjHAT-0001Zp-C2 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:08:37 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 08F57E10F5 for ; Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:08:37 +0000 (UTC) Received: from amun.cheops.ods.org (amun.cheops.ods.org [82.95.138.191]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 61490E0E30 for ; Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:36:51 +0000 (UTC) Received: from tefnut.cheops.ods.org ([2001:888:1022:0:211:24ff:fe37:e46e] helo=gentoo.org) by amun.cheops.ods.org with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1NjGfd-0000Up-EV for gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org; Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:36:46 +0100 Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:36:24 +0100 From: Fabian Groffen To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-dev] Build system output verbosity, e.g. cmake Message-ID: <20100221183624.GJ20811@gentoo.org> Mail-Followup-To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (Darwin 8.11.0, VIM - Vi IMproved 7.2) Organization: Gentoo Foundation, Inc. X-Content-Scanned: by amun.cheops.ods.org (Exim Exiscan) using SpamAssassin and ClamAV X-Archives-Salt: 66f4eb86-b3a5-4bed-8be3-3c626d6db67a X-Archives-Hash: a4907093258ecf3ec385814eced672d9 Hi all, Inspired by the recent poppler move from autoconf to cmake for its build system, the following. Given that poppler didn't compile on at least two arches, I found that cmake is pretty much terse in its output, especially when errors are encountered. Often it is important to know how the compiler or linker was invoked, to be able to (quickly) resolve the issue at hand. Cmake doesn't seem to report such call by default, it needs VERBOSE=1 to be set in the environment in order to do so. I recently proposed to enable this by default for cmake, but got some negative feedback for that. Hence, I'd like to know the opinion of more people on the issue. In the past we have had verbose build systems, that printed a lot of messages. Portage even analyses this output to look for common problems. Newer buildsystems (like cmake), or just newer insights (like gnustep makefiles, linux kernel, git, ...) suppress more messages leading to reduced output. - should we leave defaults of build systems as is, keeping some very verbose and others very terse? - should we always enable verbosity such that we can analyse logs, both by Portage as well as in bugs when something apparently went wrong? - should make the output level consistent for all build systems? I think verbosity is useful when debugging problems. Portage's --jobs feature nicely allows to hide the "ugly" output (even with --jobs=1), still storing the log for when something goes wrong, while eliminating the need to look at it all the time. So what do you think? Pros, cons? -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo on a different level