On Sun, 23 Mar 2014, John Spencer wrote:
there are many configure scripts out there that still check for things that
are standard since at least 10 years, and doing this extensively and over and
over (people building software themselves usually build more than one
package) consumes a lot of time (especially due to the non-parallel nature of
configure scripts).
often configure scripts take longer to finish than compiling the source code
itself on decent machines with multiple cpu cores.
Agreed.
having an option like --assume-c99 could provide a shortcut so all checks
I don't like any approach which hard-codes assumptions in Autoconf.
Hard-coded assumptions can easily be wrong and configure scripts could
be used ten years later without being re-generated with the latest
rules.
The Autoconf configuration cache mechanism (e.g. --config-cache) is
very effective. In my test here, using --config-cache reduced
repeated configure run time from 20 seconds to 5 seconds. By
transcribing selected lines from config.cache to config.site, these
cached values can be made the default for a system. Modern autoconf
searches for both $prefix/share/config.site and
$prefix/etc/config.site and will use whichever ones are found.
E.g.
egrep '^ac_cv_func_select' config.cache >> /usr/local/share/config.cache
and in /usr/local/share/config.site
. /usr/local/share/config.cache
In fact, one could take a boilerplate configure.ac, use it to create a
bare configure, and then use most of its config.cache to form
config.site.
With this approach, Autoconf can be optimized for a system with known
behavior without placing brittle assumptions within Autoconf itself.
A separate script could be used to create a reusable subset of
config.cache based on a specification.
BTFW that some software might not configure correctly given the
presence of a config.site file. In my experience, a config.site file
can cause harm when configuring GCC.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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