Making output of make more beautiful
Hey, automake provides a way to replace the command line generated in a Makefile by GEN output-file Is it possible to add 2 features : 1) adding a percentage at the beginning of the line 2) displaying the lines with a color according to what is done (compilation, execution or error) ? (a bit like cmake or waf do) Thank you Vincent Torri
Re: Making output of make more beautiful
On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 14:04 +0200, Vincent Torri wrote: Is it possible to add 2 features : 1) adding a percentage at the beginning of the line People often ask for this, but it's not possible: a percentage of what? The way make works, it has absolutely no idea how much work there is left to do. Make does not plan out all the operations it needs to run, then start working on them: rather, it knows what it wants to build and it works on it one step at a time until there are no more steps to take. But when it's working on step 5 it has no idea if there is one step left, or 100. So computing a percent complete cannot be done. Certainly there's no way automake can do this. 2) displaying the lines with a color according to what is done (compilation, execution or error) Today, make does no processing on the output of the commands it invokes: they just write directly to stdout, so colorizing error or warning messages by make is not possible. This feature could conceivably be added (in fact, there are even more legitimate reasons for make to process job output than colorization: when make invokes parallel builds the output from the parallel jobs is today all jumbled together which makes it difficult to read: there are enhancement requests to allow the output to be buffered then displayed all at once when the command completes). The colorization of different types of rules (rather than output) is most easily accomplished by automake, by adding that directly to the output. However, both of these could also be, and are perhaps most easily, accomplished via an extra colorization tool, where the output of make is piped into this tool which reads stdin, colorizes it, then displays it. This saves a lot of effort and change in make and automake and provides a clean and much more easily modifiable colorization environment. -- --- Paul D. Smith psm...@gnu.org Find some GNU make tips at: http://www.gnu.org http://make.mad-scientist.us Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional. --Mad Scientist
Re: Making output of make more beautiful
Hello Paul, Vincent, * Paul Smith wrote on Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 02:22:51PM CEST: On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 14:04 +0200, Vincent Torri wrote: Is it possible to add 2 features : 1) adding a percentage at the beginning of the line People often ask for this, but it's not possible: a percentage of what? I'll play devil's advocate on this one. You can communicate to the toplevel `make' invocation, in the same manner as the job server, the number of targets considered and the number of sub-makes invoked. That won't give you a percentage, of course, as neither needs to be constant over two `make' invocations nor with different MAKECMDGOALS. But these two numbers can give a rough estimate on the progress. 2) displaying the lines with a color according to what is done (compilation, execution or error) The colorization of different types of rules (rather than output) is most easily accomplished by automake, by adding that directly to the output. Yes; and in fact, Automake 1.11 has the option 'color-tests' which can cause the output of 'make check' to be colorized, if you use the builtin test driver (i.e., TESTS = ...). For normal build rules, I would go this way only with another option, and only if there was a useful and easy semantics for this colorization. For highlighting compiler warnings, I'd just try out the 'silent-rules' Automake option (Linux kernel-style build output). However, both of these could also be, and are perhaps most easily, accomplished via an extra colorization tool, where the output of make is piped into this tool which reads stdin, colorizes it, then displays it. This saves a lot of effort and change in make and automake and provides a clean and much more easily modifiable colorization environment. Of course; and in fact, editors have been doing this task very well for years already. But now that we're already on our way to the dark side, see above, it's even more difficult to convince users that it's the wrong path. ;-) Cheers, Ralf
