(automake-1.16.info)Make verbosity

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21.1 Make is verbose by default
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Normally, when executing the set of rules associated with a target,
‘make’ prints each rule before it is executed.  This behaviour, while
having been in place for a long time, and being even mandated by the
POSIX standard, starkly violates the “silence is golden” UNIX
principle(1):

     When a program has nothing interesting or surprising to say, it
     should say nothing.  Well-behaved Unix programs do their jobs
     unobtrusively, with a minimum of fuss and bother.  Silence is
     golden.

   In fact, while such verbosity of ‘make’ can theoretically be useful
to track bugs and understand reasons of failures right away, it can also
hide warning and error messages from ‘make’-invoked tools, drowning them
in a flood of uninteresting and seldom useful messages, and thus
allowing them to go easily undetected.

   This problem can be very annoying, especially for developers, who
usually know quite well what’s going on behind the scenes, and for whom
the verbose output from ‘make’ ends up being mostly noise that hampers
the easy detection of potentially important warning messages.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) See also <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s09.html>.