Re: [PATCH] build: speed up configure for releases

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/24/11 10:31, Eric Blake wrote:
> Hmm, it may still make sense to do both things - make it possible
> to completely elide HAVE_RAW_DECL_* (this patch) for configure
> built for a tarball, as well as to provide a configure option
> (rather than the current ad-hoc approach of
> make CFLAGS=-DGNULIB_POSIXCHECK=1) to make it more apparent when
> a developer is explicitly building for posix check purposes
> and to thus speed up builds when the option is not in effect.

That sort of thing sounds useful, yes.  I have another
idea or two which you may want to throw into the pot.

When I used gl_ASSERT_NO_GNULIB_POSIXCHECK in Emacs (see
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=8d38eb490bdd94432de803575ac3663cef360285>)
aclocal helpfully informed me that m4/warn-on-use.m4 was unnecessary,
so I added a line "rm m4/warn-on-use.m4" to the Make rule
for "make sync-from-gnulib".  This is a bit ad-hoc and it'd
be nice if gnulib-tool would automate it.

More generally, it'd be nice if there were a package
"no-gnulib-posixcheck" that would do all this for me.
Or, perhaps even better, a package "gnulib-posixcheck" that would
enable the HAVE_RAW_DECL_* stuff, with the default
being to disable it.  The latter might be easier because
then its Files: section could list m4/warn-on-use.m4,
and we could remove m4/warn-on-use.m4 from the warn-on-use
module, and remove the need for gl_ASSERT_NO_GNULIB_POSIXCHECK.