Re: configure -C by default?

[Eric Blake]

On 02/06/2011 03:11 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Apparently, a lot of users do not even know about configure -C aka.
> --config-cache which of course doesn't help Autoconf's reputation about
> producing configure scripts which are slow even for development.
> 
> So one question would be what about making -C the default?
> We could have --force or --no-cache to turn it off.

I prefer to keep it off by default, but wouldn't mind advertising that
(when used correctly) it does provide great speedups within a single
project.

Personally, I use it all the time.  It makes a HUGE difference for
cygwin, but even on Linux, it is a noticeable speed improvement.  And
yes, stale caches are still very much a real issue - cross-package
caches are too dangerous, and I have run into issues where stale caches
bite me (for example, if gnulib enhances a configure test that marks a
platform's function as non-compliant where it used to be compliant);
I've gotten into the habit of nuking config.cache any time I update
gnulib as a result.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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