A More Silent make; no mkdir, install, PASS, ...

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

I'm fond of `make -s'. It doesn't work too well with the
automake-generated Makefile on
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nmh.git/tree/Makefile.am that I
contribute to. In hand-written Makefiles in the past, I've checked
MAKEFLAGS against *s* to decide whether to echo, etc. IIRC.

I find that on a `make -s all check distcheck' the long list of mkdir
and install commands explicitly echo'd, a stream of PASS, and the
repeating of such as the distcheck target goes to work means I tend to
keep an eye on the final few lines of output as a success indicator for
the whole build. This isn't good as things like compiler warnings,
etc., are missed as they're buried in the noise. (Yes, I know of
-Werror, but that only covers one specific point.)

Ideally, I'd like to only see SKIP, as it could be considered a warning,
and FAIL from make's work, not the creation of the directory trees or
the PASSes. I don't think that's possible today? Can consideration be
given to adding it. It's so nice to do `make -s', wait a bit, and have
no output on success.