shave: making the autotools output sane

updated: Automake 1.11 has been release with “silent rules” support, a feature that supersedes the hack that shave is. If you can depend on automake 1.11 please consider using its silent rules rather than shave.
updated: add some gtk-doc info
updated: CXX support thanks to Tommi Komulainen

shave

Fed up with endless screens of libtool/automake output? Fed up with having to resort to -Werror to see warnings in your code? Then shave might be for you. shave transforms the messy output of autotools into a pretty Kbuild-like one (Kbuild is the Linux build system). It’s composed of a m4 macro and 2 small shell scripts and it’s available in a git repository.

git clone git://git.lespiau.name/shave

Hopefully, in a few minutes, you should be able to see your project compile like this:

$ make
Making all in foo
Making all in internal
CC    internal-file0.o
LINK  libinternal.la
CC    lib-file0.o
CC    lib-file1.o
LINK  libfoo.la
Making all in tools
CC    tool0-tool0.o
LINK  tool0

Just like Kbuild, shave supports outputting the underlying commands using:

$ make V=1

Setup

• Put the two shell scripts shave.in and shave-libtool.in in the directory of your choice (it can be at the root of your autotooled project).
• add shave and shave-libtool to AC_CONFIG_FILES
• add shave.m4 either in acinclude.m4 or your macro directory
• add a call to SHAVE_INIT just before AC_CONFIG_FILES/AC_OUTPUT. SHAVE_INIT takes one argument, the directory where shave and shave-libtool are.

Custom rules

Sometimes you have custom Makefile rules, e.g. to generate a small header, run glib-mkenums or glib-genmarshal. It would be nice to output a pretty ‘GEN’ line. That’s quite easy actually, just add few (portable!) lines at the top of your Makefile.am:

V         = @
Q         = $(V:1=)
QUIET_GEN = $(Q:@=@echo '  GEN   '$@;)

and then it’s just a matter of prepending $(QUIET_GEN) to the rule creating the file:

lib-file2.h: Makefile
$(QUIET_GEN)echo "#define FOO_DEFINE 0xbabe" > lib-file2.h

gtk-doc + shave

gtk-doc + shave + libtool 1.x (2.x is fine) is known to have a small issue, a patch is available. Meanwhile I suggest adding a few lines to your autogen.sh script.

sed -e 's#) –mode=compile#) –tag=CC –mode=compile#' gtk-doc.make > gtk-doc.temp <br />&& mv gtk-doc.temp gtk-doc.make
sed -e 's#) –mode=link#) –tag=CC –mode=link#' gtk-doc.make > gtk-doc.temp <br />&& mv gtk-doc.temp gtk-doc.make

dolt + shave

It’s possible to use dolt in conjunction with shave with a surprisingly small patch to dolt.

Real world example: Clutter

$ make
GEN   stamp-clutter-marshal.h
GEN   clutter-marshal.c
GEN   stamp-clutter-enum-types.h
Making all in cogl
Making all in common
CC    cogl-util.o
CC    cogl-bitmap.o
CC    cogl-bitmap-fallback.o
CC    cogl-primitives.o
CC    cogl-bitmap-pixbuf.o
CC    cogl-clip-stack.o
CC    cogl-fixed.o
CC    cogl-color.o
cogl-color.c: In function ‘cogl_set_source_color4ub’:
cogl-color.c:141: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘cogl_set_source_color’
CC    cogl-vertex-buffer.o
CC    cogl-matrix.o
CC    cogl-material.o
LINK  libclutter-cogl-common.la
[…]

Eh! now we can see a warning there!

TODO

This is a first release, shave has not been widely tested aka it may not work for you!

• test it with a wider range of automake/libtool versions
• shave won’t work without AC_CONFIG_HEADERS due to shell quoting problems
• see what can be done for make install/dist (they are prettier thanks to make -s, but we probably miss a few actions)
• there is a ‘-s’ hardcoded in MAKEFLAGS,  I have to find a way to make it more flexible