[CCing bug-gettext, since po/Makefile.in.in comes from GNU gettext.] Marcus Müller wrote in <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2023-03/msg00034.html>:
> msgmerge: do not print progress indicators This is a reasonable request, but not for the reasons that you state. > Progress indicators in Makefiles are nearly universally unappreciated This is an unverifiable claim. Many people think that their personal opinion is "nearly universal". > since they completely break compactness of the build log Compactness of the build log is not a goal. In fact, everyone who uses, for continuous integration, a machine to which they do not have ssh access is happy about verbosity and frustrated when a build log is too compact. > and also make output humanly unparseable if -j>1 is used 'make -jN' always produces garbled output. This is not a reason to suppress output from various tools. With the same argument, you could request that compilers no longer emit error messages, but only report success or failure through a status code. The real justification is that when this Makefile.in.in was invented, around 1995, 'msgmerge' was slow, and the machines were slow. A normal msgmerge run could take 1 minute or 5 minutes. Nowadays, I ran msgmerge with the largest POT file we have in GNU (gcc-13.1-b20230212.pot, with gcc-12.1.0.fr.po). It completes in about 50 seconds of CPU time and 4 seconds of wall clock time. For most packages, which have POT files smaller than this, msgmerge thus completes in 1 second or less. This does not require a progress indicator. msgmerge became faster - through an index-based fuzzy search (msgl-fsearch.c) in 2006, - through OpenMP parallelization in 2006, - through processor speedups over the years. The only case where msgmerge is still slow is when a compendium is in use; this is a translator use-case, not covered by Makefile.in.in. So, I agree that in Makefile.in.in, the --quiet option makes sense. The package's maintainer could already enable this option by setting MSGMERGE_OPTIONS in the po/Makevars file. Still, we can enable --quiet also without explicit action from the package's maintainer. Done through https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=commitdiff;h=093929b1d90a98bf0986ded8b629a9d232a85e2e Bruno
