Ninja could really benefit from pretty printing

[chipweinberger]

Thanks for working on ninja!

Ninja prints huge walls of text during build.

Each time I need to debug, I need to spend a minute reformatting it first.

Would it be feasible for ninja to use newlines for command line options?

Compared to:

[chipweinberger]

Where in the code are these line printed? Trying to find it...

Edit: think its here

void StatusPrinter::PrintStatus(const Edge* edge, int64_t time_millis) {
  if (config_.verbosity == BuildConfig::QUIET
      || config_.verbosity == BuildConfig::NO_STATUS_UPDATE)
    return;

  bool force_full_command = config_.verbosity == BuildConfig::VERBOSE;

  string to_print = edge->GetBinding("description");
  if (to_print.empty() || force_full_command)
    to_print = edge->GetBinding("command");

  to_print = FormatProgressStatus(progress_status_format_, time_millis)
      + to_print;

  printer_.Print(to_print,
                 force_full_command ? LinePrinter::FULL : LinePrinter::ELIDE);
}

[chipweinberger]

As someone new to the codebase, perhaps in BuildConfig next to verbosity we can add a new option, 'prettyFlags':

  Verbosity verbosity;
  bool prettyFlags;

At the simplest, it could just replace -X to \n-X.** Where X is [0-9,A-Z,a-z]. Not ideal of course. but simple and completely covers most gcc use cases.

[chipweinberger]

That said it looks like Ninja has quite a bit of information available to it. DEFINES, INLUDES, FLAGS, etc. So if we wanted we could be smarter than that^^

[eli-schwartz]

Would it be feasible for ninja to use newlines for command line options?

That would make it more readable, but also make it no longer copy-paste and run correctly. Seems wrong to do by default, but maybe an option?

That said it looks like Ninja has quite a bit of information available to it. DEFINES, INLUDES, FLAGS, etc. So if we wanted we could be smarter than that^^

Those are just arbitrary project-defined variables so Ninja doesn't really know anything about it at all. Although it's possible to just dump "the build rule definition as textually written in build.ninja" I guess.

[chipweinberger]

Thanks for your consideration!

Yes a flag would be great. I would love this feature. No need to overcomplicate it at this point. Just a text replace for " -XXX"

You lose copy paste, yes, but you can get back the original input by deleting the new lines.

[chipweinberger]

maybe the command could be

"ninja -insert-new-lines"

or

"-parse-flags"

or

"-pretty-flags"

I think I like the last one best.

[jhasse]

Good idea :)

I doubt this is something that will be added to Ninja itself in the future, but have a look at my frontend ja.

That would make it more readable, but also make it no longer copy-paste and run correctly.

This could be fixed by adding \ before newlines.