Re: parallelized configure

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014, Alexander Holler wrote:
> I just was curious if there was some progress on that topic besides what Ralf 
> Wildenhues seemed to have tried out.

The most challenging aspect is because configure scripts have a huge 
amount of dependencies (e.g. shell variable definitions) which only 
work due to the sequential nature of the script.  In order to 
parallize configure, one would need to somehow assure that results are 
available in the correct order.  Such logic is normal in make files 
but not in shell scripts.

Part of configure scripts is written by the developers of a package 
and not from Autoconf and Autoconf has no way to predict the behavior 
of code which is outside of its control.

Regardless, configure scripts are not actually the main problem with 
package build times on modern hardware.  The main problem is that most 
free software packages are not constructed correctly so that they can 
take advantage of parallel builds.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/