On 7 June 2013 23:10, Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Darren Garvey <darren.gar...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been trying to make a large automake-generated project I work on
> build
> > quieter. While there is some support for "silent-rules", there are
> several
> > places where automake templates* don't silence themselves, which I'd like
> > to rectify.
> >
> > I have made several changes locally which helps a lot and I'd like to
> > prepare a patch. Since I've not hacked on automake before I may need some
> > guidance on conventions as not all of them are obvious to me.
> >
> > To make a rule conditionally silent, I use $(AM_V_at) in _my_ projects,
> but
> > automake sources itself have %SILENT% which seems to be equivalent, IIUC.
> > Is %SILENT% preferred?
> >
> My understanding is as follows. Strings like %SILENT% are substituted
> in the templates by the "file_contents" function, and probably end up
> as "$(AM_V_at)". See the "silent_flag" function. I think it would be
> better to use %SILENT% for consistency. There is also the %VERBOSE%
> automake-time substitution, but this expands to something different
> for every language (e.g. "$(AM_V_CC)").
>
%SILENT% doesn't work in any of the places I tried. I'm speculating that
this is because it's substituted too early. I see it being used in a few
places (eg. lib/am/library.am), but those rules are full of other %NAME%
strings.
I'm seeing some test failures, using v1.11, but these seem unrelated to my
changes. The v1.13 release notes talk about possible spurious test
failures, but I'm getting 9 test failures on Fedora 18. I'll check with the
latest release.
> The HACKING file says:
> >
> >> * For install and uninstall rules, if a loop is required, it should be
> >> silent. Then the body of the loop itself should print each
> "important"
> >> command it runs. The printed commands should be preceded by a single
> >> space.
> >
> > This means there are several places in the templates that have a long
> > multi-line rule that is itself silent, but includes one or more "echo"s.
> > One idea was to define a local function such as:
> >
> > am_echo() { echo "$@" >/dev/null; }
> >
> > and then define $(AM_V_echo) that conditionally used either "echo" or
> > "am_echo". This feels a bit ugly but it should be minimally intrusive.
> > Perhaps there's a more canonical way to do this using some existing
> > automake feature. I imagine anyone working on the silent-rules support
> may
> > have already thought about this and may have a superior alternative
> > suggestion....
> How about setting AM_V_echo to either "echo" or something like "true",
> and writing "$(AM_V_echo) whatever" instead of "echo whatever", if
> this is desired?
>
Aha! I didn't realise "true" could take arguments. I'll try that and see if
it works. Thanks.
I'll bake up a patch.
Cheers,
Darren
