|
From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | Re: CHECK_STRUCTS/dmpstruct.h mechanism is broken. |
Date: | Mon, 15 Apr 2019 07:14:30 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.6.1 |
Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Is there anything particular about Autoconf that makes it difficult to parallelise, or is it just a case of nobody stepping up to do the work?
Autoconf does not keep track of dependencies, and attempting to add dependency tracking would require a significant internal redesign. A plausible approach would be to turn 'configure' into a front-end to a GNU makefile instead of being a sequential shell script. (Alternatively I suppose one could try to keep track of dependencies in the shell; good luck with that!) There would be significant changes to the Autoconf input language. Plus I expect there would be a new requirement for GNU Make, which would be a show-stopper for some projects. For compatibility we'd need to continue to support older sequential configure.ac files. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, only that it's a much bigger deal than simply moving Emacs away from Autoconf.
"Nobody stepping up to do the work" is also a factor, of course.
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |