[U-Boot] [PATCH] make make quiet

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Scott,

In message <20090105195311.GA24702 at ld0162-tx32.am.freescale.net> you wrote:
>
> > But that's the preferred way of doing things, at least according to
> > Unix Philosophy.
> 
> Let's not get so bogged down in following some overgeneralized philosophy
> that we ignore the preferences of users.

Well, users are often in dire need to learn about the philosophical
background of a design.

> Besides, if you really wanted the build to be like a typical Unix tool,
> shouldn't -s be default, and verbose an option?  Patches of this sort get
> closer to that.

I have to admit that I almost always just run "./MAKEALL boardname",
which actually is as silent as "-s" (but it stores the *full* log in
case anything goes wrong).

> Most people don't use -s, and this will make more people see warnings.

Most people don;t use out of tree building either,  and  most  people
never run MAKEALL, not even before submitting patches.

That's the line of "a billion flies can't be wrong, you know.

> > U-Boot is the wrong place to fix this. Please fix this in make, for
> > the benefit of others, too.
> 
> Hmm, the best make could reasonably do on its own would be to print the
> name of each target, but that could get cluttered with intermediate and
> fake targets.  While such an option would be very nice, I don't think it
> should preclude makefile support for nicer output.

"make" knows exactly when it is running $(CC) or $(AS)  or  $(AR)  or
$(LD)  etc.,  so it can do automatically what now everybody is adding
to a zillion of innocent Makefiles.

Sorry, but the make process is complicated enough without this  fancy
stuff.  Every  now and then it shows funny behaviour. Just searcht he
archives for obscure build errors on ext3 but  not  on  NFS  or  vice
versa.  If  ther eis a real "make" expert here, there are many better
places to invest efforts for improvement. A semi-silent build is far,
far down on th list.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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