If you’ve ever built Mozilla from source or run the unit tests, you’ll know that doing so can generate a lot of console output. When errors happen, it can take a bit of scrolling to figure out exactly what failed, and where. I recently switched to pymake (because it’s sooo much faster), and it generates even more output.
Recently Shawn mentioned he had some magic pixie dust to colorize build output (which I didn’t know was possible on Windows), and I extended what he had to do a bit more. I’m finding it hugely useful, so figured I should share!
First, the pretty picture. This particular example is a bit gaudy, but shows a lot of what it does. The mostly useless nsinstall output (of which there’s a *lot*) is dark blue. Compiler warnings are yellow, errors are red.
Oh, and xpcshell tests benefit too!
To add this to your Windows MozillaBuild environment, just add this stuff to ~/.profile, and then open a new shell window.
There’s probably a lot more that could be done with this (and I’m sure it missed all kinds of interesting cases), but it’s a good, simple start!
Oooh, does that mean it’ll work under Linux bash as well? I’m excited to try it out.
Wouldn’t it be easier to use
function cmake() {
gmake ${*:+”$@”} 2>&1 | sed -f colour.txt
}
(replace with your favourite make program and arguments) so that you can easily experiment by editing colour.txt?
${*:+”$@”} is needed in case you don’t want to specify any arguments.
What does the -r flag to sed do, my sed doesn’t have it?
nice stuff! thanks for sharing.
fwiw, i’ve updated sed to latest version (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS%20sed/)and added -u (unbuffered) option, otherwise xpcshell-tests output was buffered here. That was not really good for folders having lot of xpcshell tests (like Places).
-r should be extended regexp afaik
There’s also colormake for the lazy (like me) on linux:
http://bre.klaki.net/programs/colormake/README.txt
(sudo apt-get install colormake)
Not as robust as the killer python script, but it colorizes warnings and errors in the make output.