[U-Boot] [PATCH] make make quiet

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Remy,

In message <3efb10970901051230w654dc1d0w2fbf878ca853cdcb at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> 
> > I think your appraoch (and that  of  kbuild,  too)  is  fundamentally
> > broken.
> 
> Maybe the configure structure, like u-boot has, that is so complex, so
> hard to customise, so error prone, and were relations between options
> is so unclear from the users perspective, is fundamentally broken
> ;-)))

It may be broken (or at least in need of imprevement), too. But that
doesn't contradict my statement.

> I thought of it before to integrate Kconfig/kbuild and friends in
> U-boot, but I got the impression back then that it would have a very
> small chance of being ever accepted, so I did not invest much time in
> it...

You know that Jean-Christophe is working on this, don't you?

> > Fixing  this  on the Makefile level is at least one level to
> > far up. If you really want a verbosity level of make that is  between
> > no  options  (normal  case) and no output (except warnings/errors, as
> > with -s), then this should be implemnted within make itself, as a new
> > make option.Then you have the changes in one place only, and each and
> > every software package can benefit from  it.  Modifying  hundrets  of
> > Makefiles here and there and then again for each new software package
> > makes absolutely no sense to me.
> 
> Maybe the linux makefile structure is a much better approach :-)))
> (in that case even weak-linking could work properly)

No, please don't mix things up here. There are already quite a lot of
tools out there which use such a "silencing" in their Makefiles. And
more and more do it. So it cannot ba a bad thing, he?

But wait - it is a very basic principle of software design  *not*  to
do  the  same  thing  again  and  again and from scratch in every new
project. It is good design to do this just *once*, at the right place
where it provides the required function for  all  those  looking  for
that feature.

If semi-silent output from a Makefile is wanted, then the "make" tool
itself is the correct place to add  this  feature.  Adding  it  to  a
zillion  Makefiles  in  many different projects is very fundamentally
broken.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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