For a long time, I’ve used colorgcc as a way to highlight warnings and errors in GCC output. It’s worked wonderfully, but today Travis pointed out that GCC has grown an option to enable colourised output: -fdiagnostics-color. This will be available in GCC 4.9, but the patch seems to have been backported to Fedora 19 so that more people can join in the fun.

This means I can throw away colorgcc from my .jhbuildrc:

os.environ['CC'] = '/usr/bin/color-gcc'

and enable -fdiagnostics-color:

os.environ['CFLAGS'] += ' -fdiagnostics-color=auto'

Even better, adding the following snippet to configure.ac in a standard automake project will automatically enable colourised compiler output if the compiler (is GCC and) supports it:

AS_COMPILER_FLAG([-fdiagnostics-color=auto],
                 [AM_CFLAGS="$AM_CFLAGS -fdiagnostics-color=auto"])

(In actual fact, I used ERROR_CFLAGS for this in folks, to keep unrelated CFLAGS separated, but that’s an implementation detail of folks’ build system.)