In ardino-cli 0.33.1, compiler errs & warnings are no longer colorized

Development Tools Arduino Command Line Tools
1

This is on MacOS 11.7.6, with arduino-cli 0.33.1 installed via Brew.

To be clear: arduino-cli's summary output at the end of compilation (just the list of libraries) is still lightly colorized. But gcc's much more meaningful colorization is gone.

This is pretty bad for me. For instance, when using cli 0.28.0 the actual compiler error that is buried in the output is colored red, which is the only thing that makes it easy to locate. Warnings were purple, et cetera.

I have downgraded to 0.28 for now. The bug may have cropped up in any intervening version, but color definitely works correctly in 0.28 .

3

I am calling arduino-cli from Makefile, so I "fixed" this by adding colors myself - something around these lines
arduino-cli --config-file $(CONFIG) --library $(LIBS) compile $(VERBOSE) --fqbn $(BOARD) $(MORE_FLAGS) *.ino 2>&1 |sed "s/\[90m/[96m/g;s/: warning:/$(COLOR)\0$(NOCOLOR)/g;s/\[-[^]]*\]/$(COLOR)\0$(NOCOLOR)/g"

(This fix the gray color for paths to cyan and warning messages) Note, that the warnings goes to stderr, so it needs to join it by 2>&1

4

Well yeah, one could in theory re-write the functionality of GCC, but why make users do that? Just fix this bug.

I have determined that if I take any one of the GCC commands that arduino-cli emits and run that command directly from the shell, gcc colorization is present. So it's arduino-cli that's filtering out or disabling colorization of gcc's output, even though it also uses colorization for its own auxilliary output.

5

I submitted a formal bug report to the Arduino CLI developers on your behalf:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention @myklemykle.

6

Thank you! I guess I posted this in the wrong place.

7

I did some further investigation and found that the coloration returns if I force the compiler to add the escape codes to its output by adding the -fdiagnostics-color flag to the compilation commands.

With boards platforms that follow best practices by allowing the user to inject arbitrary flags into the compilation commands via the compiler.c.extra_flags and compiler.cpp.extra_flags and platform properties, you can do this from the arduino-cli compile command using its --build-property flag:

arduino-cli compile --build-property "compiler.c.extra_flags=-fdiagnostics-color=always" --build-property "compiler.cpp.extra_flags=-fdiagnostics-color=always" [...]

The forum is the appropriate place to request assistance using Arduino CLI or to discuss subjects related to it with the community.

Feedback is also welcome here. We do our best, but the available resources are simply insufficient to achieve full monitoring/investigation/escalation coverage for all the tremendous amount of activity that occurs here on the forum. So in the case of bug reports or feature requests, the most effective approach is to submit a high quality formal report to the issue tracker of the relevant repository, or better yet submit a pull request for the necessary changes.

8

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