Subject: Enabling the 'color-tests' option by default

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:29:06 +0200

Severity: wishlist

Hello automakers.

Anyone has an idea about why the 'color-tests' option should be not
enabled by default (apart from the obvious historical reasons, that
is)?

Even when this option is on, the developer is free to disable testsuite
coloring on a per-makefile basis (by adding "AM_COLOR_TESTS = no" to the
Makefile.am) or on a whole-project basis (by AC_SUBST'ing AM_COLOR_TESTS
to "no" in configure.ac).  And the best thing about these approaches is
that they still allow the user to request the testsuite output to be
colorized, if he really wants to:

    # With GNU make:
    make AM_COLOR_TESTS=yes check
    # With non-GNU make:
    make AM_COLOR_TESTS=yes AM_MAKEFLAGS=AM_COLOR_TESTS=yes check

So I think we should make the 'color-tests' option enabled by default (while
keeping it around as a no-op, for backward-compatibility), and document the
two tricks above for developers who (for one reason or another) don't want
testsuite colorization enabled by default.

WDYT?

Regards,
  Stefano