Re: AC_REQUIRE problems

[Paul Eggert]

Dan Manthey <address@hidden> writes:

> Broadly speaking, the act of configuration is that of setting variables to
> describe the build environment.

Autoconf often sets the variables by putting them into a file, e.g.,
something like config.h.  "make" could do this just as easily.

> If there is no way to request a test before it is needed, then there
> is no benefit to running it asynchronously.

True, but most of autoconf usage is a simple static dependency graph.
Autoconf has the power to do dynamic dependencies, but in practice
this feature is relatively rarely used (and is often used wrongly).
Hardly anybody would care if it went.

>> in shell, you probably have to count the number of processes
>> yourself.

Sure.

> The only reason we're discussing in now anyway is that it comes
> along with using Make for dependencies.

No, I'm discussing it because "configure" Is Way Too Slow.

> (2) Have you ever tried putting a here document in Make?

That part could be done by the shell before invoking "make".

Admittedly this all would be some work to do.  But Autoconf really
should do a better job with parallelism.  I'm now seeing many cases
where it takes longer to run "configure" than to run the following
"make"!  It's getting ridiculous.