Rob Stewart <stewart@sig.com> writes:
From: David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>
"Hendrik Schober" <SpamTrap@gmx.de> writes:
David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
What should it say?
"Parsing jam file"? Or better yet: "parsing build rules"?
Well, it's much more than parsing. It's actually "evaluating" or "executing" them. I think "executing" would be misleading, so maybe "evaluating" would be better.
"Determining what needs to be built"?
Not really accurate.
"Determining the work required to build Boost"?
Kinda vague. I guess I'd say "building dependency graph." That's about as accurate as possible in this case.
So if that is insufficient to make it clear that the build will will work even without Python, what do we need to do in order to make it clear?
Maybe something along those lines: "Unable to find Python. Cannot build the Boost.Python lib. If you want to use Boost.Python, look at the docs at <link>. Proceeding with other libs..."
It's currently:
--------------------------------------------------------------------- *** If you don't need Boost.Python, you can ignore this section *** ^ Add a semicolon.
These are not supposed to be sentences. The semicolon adds nothing. If I were trying to follow rules for writing English prose the ***s would have to go too.
Well, no, but telling you that we found 4471 targets and we're updating 1123 of them has to be more cryptic than helpful!
How about something along these lines:
Found 4471 items to build, of which 3348 were already current. Updated 1123 items.
Not really accurate. Most of the items are sources (headers, even), so they're not "items to build." They're just nodes in the dependency graph.
There's always the old standby approach of printing, in succession, the following strings:
"\r-" "\r\" "\r|" "\r/" repeat
That avoids spewing thousands of lines or characters of output, yet gives active feedback.
Does that really work reliably and portably, or are some people going to see -\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/.... ?? I suppose it's not much worse than dots if they do. But if it comes out as - \ | / - \ | / - \ | / ... everyone's gonna be sorry. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com