Re: [gentoo-dev] have portage be quiet by default

[JD Horelick <jdhore1@gmail.com>]

On 14 November 2011 03:25, Alex Alexander <wired@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 05:59:21PM -0800, Zac Medico wrote:
>> Well, it's much easier to gather interest and get feedback if we deploy
>> the change and ask questions later.
>
> What if we tried solving this problem by providing more options instead
> of trying to guess what the users want? :)
>
> Imagine the following output (when jobs == 1):
>
>>>> Verifying ebuild manifests
>>>> Emerging (1 of 1) www-client/chromium-16.0.912.36
>>>> Quiet building enabled. Enable for [P]ackage or [S]ession. [L]earn more.
>>>> Jobs: 0 of 1 complete, 1 running                Load avg: 0.23, 0.18, 0.10
>
> Pressing P would only show the log for the actively built package.
> Pressing S would show all the logs for this session, starting with the
> active one.
>
> Pressing L would print out a short set of instructions, something
> like:
>
> "To make portage output easier to track and understand, --quiet-build
> has been enabled by default. You may restore the old, verbose behavior
> temporarily by using the P and S commands, or permanently by adding
> '--quiet-build=n' to your make.conf's EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS."
>
> I believe many users would appreciate the ability to output logs on
> demand. :)
> --
> Alex Alexander | wired
> + Gentoo Linux Developer
> ++ www.linuxized.com
>

IMO, that is *THE PERFECT* solution. It requires writing a significant
amount of code (i'd bet), but IMO, that's perfect and i think all the
rest of the detractors and most of the people in favour of
--quiet-build=y would be happy with that solution.

Another idea I had which is also difficult to implement but would
somewhat solve the "screen full of configure/make output" is to (in
portage) basically parse the output of verbose buildsystems and
reformat them to look like the output of say AutoMake's silent-rules
or CMake. That way each line is like "CC" + filename, as opposed to a
couple hundred character line full of the entire GCC command.

I'd prefer Alex's suggestion though.