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automake-1.16: Make verbosity

 
 21.1 Make is verbose by default
 ===============================
 
 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>.
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