[ccache] New release (with color) any time soon?

[Egmont Koblinger]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:

>
> Can someone describe the ccache support for this?  I wonder how it might
> (or might not) interact with GNU make's method of determining whether
> there's a controlling TTY, in cases where make's output synchronization
> is enabled.
>
>
I'm really not the right guy to answer this, but here's what I believe
happens (after playing a bit with ccache+colors and taking a glimpse at the
patch that introduced this feature, and also quickly checking make's
--output-sync now).

The most important thing is that ccache should always remain totally
transparent, and this is guaranteed with coloring too.  ccache figures out
what kind of coloring gcc would use if it was called directly (rather than
via ccache), depending on whether the stdout/err is a tty, on
-f(no-)diagnostics-color=xx and $GCC_COLORS.  It includes all these values
in the hash(*) and forces gcc to use color if necessary (because the actual
gcc's output is not a tty).

(*) This means that if you perform the same complications with tty output
(colors enabled) and with redirected output (no colors), it won't share the
cache. This causes some performance regression in case you first do a
colored "gcc" to your tty, but upon seeing tons of errors you decide to run
"gcc | less" to examine them. Also if you alter GCC_COLORS you won't get
any cache hits.

(Theoretically, ccache could instead always invoke gcc by forcing one
particular color set where every kind of message has a different color, and
then do a search-replace to the actual runtime colors or no colors; then it
could share cache results. That would be the more conventional and better
stacking order: caching below, coloring above. I understand it's harder to
implement/maintain and the benefits would be quite low compared to the
current solution.)

make's --output-sync causes gcc (without ccache) not to use any coloring by
default (since gcc's output is not a tty but a pipe or tmpfile to make),
and having ccache in front of gcc doesn't change this.  You might specify
-fdiagnostics-color=always in your Makefile, again, I believe the presence
of ccache should be transparent and you'd get colors.

Don't trust me blindly, I might be wrong in anything I said above :)


egmont