2011-11-14

Should portage hide build output from the user by default?

There has recently been a discussion on gentoo-dev about making portage output less noisy
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_4f0401066abe2dc04458a952ac2a17bd.xml

A solution was implemented to suppress the build output (the configure, make and install) by default, unless the user specifies --quiet-build=n explicitly. There were both supporters and critics of that idea, but no real data about what users think.


If you have an opinion on this, please visit  the forums and participate in the poll and/or comment in the forum thread:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (plain)
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (ssl)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

why do i have to register another stupid forum to take part in the poll?

Anonymous said...

I have to agree with previous comment, signing up for yet another forum just to express this opinion is counter-productive.

My opinion? I use emerge -qv to get the best view I can today only showing build output when there is an error.

Anonymous said...

I also wouldn't register in this forum just to leave a single comment. In my opinion, hiding the build output is a very wrong thing to do, far too many problems then will go unnoticed. It is quite often a case when a package is built seemingly ok but observing build output one can see a severe problem.

Unknown said...

Yes, unfortunately there is no way to make yourself heard without any kind of account.

If you have a Google account, then you can participate in the discussion on Google+

If you have a Twitter account, post with the #gentoo tag.

If you have a blog, you can register it at Planet Larry, which aggregates Gentoo user blogs.

Jens said...

I think, a discussion about the default value for this feature is not really helpful, but it is good to know that there is such quiet option.
Another suggestion would be, to collect the messages many builds generate at their completion ("After upgrade do this and that..." as system specific news to be read with "eselect news read new" or similar. Far too often I loose such hints after a larger upgrade. Or am I missing something?

Unknown said...

Hi Jens,
You appear to miss the options

# This sets what to log
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
# And this is how to do it
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"

in /etc/make.conf. The output is written to PORT_LOGDIR which is usually /var/log/portage/elog. Or you can use a tool like elogv or elogviewer to view the contents of the log.

Jens said...

I missed those options, though I knew of a different log from portage where they appear. But to have them as (single) messages would ease the workflow, read first message, follow instructions, read next...

Unknown said...

Hmm. This is exactly what the ELOG system does. It just shows these types of messages that show up at the and of an ebuild process. You might reduce the noise by just choosing

PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error"

The LOG messages are most of time not so interesting.