Bug#628515: recommending verbose build logs
Hi Matthias,
Matthias Klose wrote:
> It's always interesting to look at build logs, or to receive bug reports of the form
>
> CC
> <compiler error message>
>
> or
>
> CCLD
> <linker error message>
>
> without knowing how the compiler or the linker were called. Maybe it is
> convenient for a package maintainer watching the build scrolling by (some of
> these are even colorized), but lacking this kind of information in the first
> place seems to be the wrong thing. So please let us deprecate this anti-feature
> and recommend verbose build logs by default and only turn them off by request
> (e.g. with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noverbose).
As much as I agree with your goal (being able to easily understand and
diagnose miscompilations and build failures) I do not suspect there is
a consensus for this. Some maintainers enjoy reading abbreviated
build logs, where error messages and warnings stand out.
So how can we make progress anyway? I would propose introducing
something very similar to what you mentioned above, but just flipping
the default. People who want verbose build logs could use
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=verbose
Then I think there would be a strong case for making that the default
on autobuilders, but that's a separate question, anyway.
Strawman patch below. What do you think?
diff --git i/policy.sgml w/policy.sgml
index 31226328..34a195f1 100644
--- i/policy.sgml
+++ w/policy.sgml
@@ -2224,6 +2224,17 @@
stripped from the binary during installation, so that
debugging information may be included in the package.
</item>
+ <tag>verbose</tag>
+ <item>
+ This tag means that compiler and linker commands used to
+ build the package should not be abbreviated in the
+ log.<footnote>
+ Packages built with <tt>cmake</tt>, autotools, or
+ the Linux kernel build system can implement this by
+ passing the parameters <tt>V=1</tt> and
+ <tt>VERBOSE=1</tt> as arguments to <tt>make</tt>.
+ </footnote>
+ </item>
<tag>parallel=n</tag>
<item>
This tag means that the package should be built using up
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