I'm sorry to say that the new -O option can interact *badly* with Automake-generated parallel testsuites (at least when they are being run "interactively", that is, with the output of make connected to a tty).
Let me elaborate a little (if you still have doubts or objections after reading the considerations below, please do not hesitate to ask for clarifications). For long-running testsuite with lots of tests, the use of the '-O' option prevents the results from the tests already run to be displayed on the screen until the *whole* testsuite has run. IMO, this destroys feedback and readability of the output. Try building GNU coreutils and running its testsuite with "make -j2 -O" on a slowish system to see how this can be annoying in practice. Moreover, since the output of the recipes is no longer connected to a terminal, automatic colorization of output no longer work: no more good results in green and failures in red (unless the user forces them by exporting AM_COLOR_TESTS to "always"). In defense of the '-O' option, I must say that I see how such an option can be actually useful to produce more readable logs when the output is being redirected to a file (so that one doesn't care about real-time feedback on the console); but for most "interactive" usages, I believe its downsides definitely overweight its advantages. So please don't ever make that option the default; if you really really want to, at least put in place some smart checks that only enable '-O' when the output is *not* a tty, so that we can have the best of both worlds (useful feedback for interactive runs, more readable logs for batch runs). Thanks, Stefano _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
