I don’t know who thought this was a good idea, but this is the output of a successful build for one of the examples in the libopencm3 project
karlp@tera:~/opencm3_f4$ make clean
karlp@tera:~/opencm3_f4$ make
karlp@tera:~/opencm3_f4$
Really? Realllly? Ok, concise output is good, but this is no output at all!
Probably the same people who think making a stdlib implementation that is GPL….
I think what you’re seeing there is the Unix philosophy at work. The idea is that silent successes make it easier to find the noisy failures. This idea is used plenty in unit testing where you often have one or a few failures in an ocean of successes, and it makes complete sense. Not as often in make processes, but maybe that person thought the project might end up being built with thousands of other projects some day.
I totally understand the philosphy, I just think this is far beyond that. I’ve also never seen it done with Make output.