Bug#209008: How should the build logs be handled?

[Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>]

        Hi,

 I added support for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS_PARALLEL to some big packages
 which are building multiple "flavors" of the software.  First, there's
 a choice of what to parallelize: do you parallelize ./configure runs
 and multiple builds when you have multiple configure + build runs to
 achieve?  Second, I noticed that the output wasn't very easy to read,
 especially with libtool based builds which produce several line of
 output and run multiple commands per object.

 So while I think it's a good thing to add such a support in packages
 for some use cases (perhaps archive rebuilds, repetitive builds of the
 same software after each commit etc.), I wonder how we will deal with
 build logs.

 Should we recommend that such builds have to save their build logs and
 output it at the end of the build?  e.g.:
   make >>debian/build.log || (cat debian/build.log; exit 1)
   cat debian/build.log

 This is what I used in my packages:
    MAKEFLAGS += $(if $(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS_PARALLEL),-j2 $(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS_PARALLEL))

 (It wont work with packages calling $(MAKE) -f debian/rules which should
 protect against adding another -j flag in the submake.)

   Bye,
-- 
Loïc Minier
"For subalterns, saying something intelligent is as risky as saying something
 stupid."