distutils no longer shows compiler commands

[jdemeyer]

Running

touch src/sage/rings/rational.pyx && ./sage -b

shows

Compiling sage/rings/rational.pyx because it changed.
[1/1] Cythonizing sage/rings/rational.pyx
Executing 1 command (using 1 thread)
[1/1] Time to execute 1 command: 0.51 seconds.
Total time spent compiling C/C++ extensions: 0.57 seconds.

Note that the compiler invocation (gcc ...) is not shown. This is really annoying for debugging. This got "broken" in #24655.

[jdemeyer]

New commits:

​c8925d1

Revert "Silence setup.py"

[saraedum]

Sorry for that.

[embray]

I actually rather like the quieter output. Couldn't we make this an option? When not debugging the extra output is not so helpful or necessary.

[saraedum]

I agree that it's easier to see where the build process is at in the quieter version, and nicer to look at when things work. However, debugging compiler related problems is really hard like this. So, I'd propose to merge this as is, so we can debug again and then improve upon this in a follow-up.

[embray]

It would be trivial to just add an option. I'll do it. "Merging" this isn't going to allow anyone to "debug" anything right now anyways since things get "merged" whenever Volker feels like it (if there were GitHub/GitLab? and I could just click "merge" I would agree).

[jdemeyer]

Too much information is annoying at worst, but missing information is impossible to get after the fact. So when logging, I very much like to err on the side of too much logging.

And an option (with quiet logging by default) is only going to make it more complicated when users ask for help. It's already hard enough to get users send logs, but with Erik's proposal we add an extra hurdle of actually getting the info that we need in the logs.

And I remind that we have the environment variable SAGE_SILENT_BUILD if you don't want to see everything on your stdout. That option still keeps the logs on disk intact.

[vbraun]

You can debate what ends up being printed to the terminal, but whatever you do make sure that the compiler invocation is written to install.log...