Nice make output

[Jason But]

From reading past posts, I gather that making the output of make nice is a 
touchy subject.  While I accept that eveybody has opinion, my idea of a nice 
Makefile is one which generates output something like

~me>make
    Compiling main.c
    Compiling foo.c
    Compiling bar.c
    Linking myprog
~me>

I personally do not care about compile flags or the like unless things go 
wrong.  I propose the following patches to do something similar.  My patches 
do not change the default output of make as run normally.  If the 
AM_CONDITIONAL(NICEOUTPUT, ) is set to true, then you get output as per 
above.

I have the line 

AM_CONDITIONAL(NICEOUTPUT, test "$enable_niceoutput" = yes)

in my configure.ac files and run configure with the line

./configure --enable_niceoutput

prior to running make.

Finally these patches currently only patch nice output for Linking and 
compiling C/C++ programs with gcc.  The same approach could be used to litter 
other *.am files to achieve similar type output.

Patches are attached

Suggestions? ideas? comments?

Jason

depend2.am.diff
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header-vars.am.diff
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program.am.diff
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