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Date:      Mon, 7 Jun 1999 13:21:36 -0600
From:      Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
To:        Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net>
Cc:        Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>, David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: bsd.lib.mk "@"'s
Message-ID:  <199906071921.NAA08649@mt.sri.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9906071515250.679-100000@picnic.mat.net>
References:  <199906071914.NAA08597@mt.sri.com> <Pine.BSF.4.10.9906071515250.679-100000@picnic.mat.net>

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> > > > > Why are many of the build lines in bsd.lib.mk hidden with leading @'s,
> > > > > so that they don't display in the build?  This is useless, it hides
> > > > > things that go wrong, and hardly belongs here, it seems to me.
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > How often do your calls to ld, mv and rm fail? 
> > > 
> > > That's not the point, the point is that current is a bleeding edge
> > > thing, not production, and the details should not be hidden, there's no
> > > possible justification for that.
> > 
> > Sure there is, in the same manner that we don't use 'cc -v' as the
> > command line parameters to see *all* the excruciating details of how a
> > program is compiled.
> > 
> > The '@' calls are not considered important details, and as such are
> > hidden.  If we include *EVERYTHING* then finding the actual problem is
> > often much harder due to trying to wade through the noise.
> > 
> > The '@' commands help to reduce the noise, giving us a better
> > signal/noise ratio.
> 
> On a buildworld, Nate?

bsd.lib.mk is used in all 'builds', not just buildworld.  When I do the
following sets of commands:

# cd /usr/src/lib/libc
# make

I also use bsd.lib.mk.

I don't *care* about the '@' commands.

> Who's worried about signal to noise there?

I am, if I'm the developer trying to debug a user's problem.  Wading
through 1-2M of logfiles to find a problem is much less likely than me
wading through 100-200K of logfiles.

> Being clean comes into play when you're seeing the same damn thing, day
> in and day out.  When it comes to troubleshooting, and that's the only
> reason to look at that listing, I want as much detail as I can get.

It's only useful information if it can *HELP* you debug the problem, and
I'll argue that 99/100 times, that information is rarely helpful.
Engineering practice suggests optimizing your solution for the 'normal'
case, not the boundary case.



Nate


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