'checking ... result' configure lines (was: what is $ac_t ?)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Eric Blake wrote on Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 07:01:07PM CEST:
> By the way, the use of "$ac_t" alongside cache results seems to be
> weird.  The whole idea was that there used to be setups where there
> was no portable way of printing text without a trailing newline, so
> for those shells, you'd get:
> 
> 'checking for ...
> ', delay, '<tab>result'
> 
> for a visual appearance of
> 
> checking for ...
>       result
> 
> which is the best you can do, compared to better shells that do
> 
> 'checking for... ', delay, 'result'
> 
> resulting in the more visually appealing
> 
> checking for ... result

By the way, there are packages (like GCC) which allow to run multiple
configure scripts in parallel (by means other than AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS).
For them, it would be nice if configure provided a means to delay the
"checking for ..." part and print the whole line at once after the test,
making interspersed stdout output a bit more readable.  (You wouldn't
be able to spot a hanging configure test from the output either way
anyway ...)

I had half a patch for this in some old branch, lemme see if I can find
the time to finish it eventually.

Cheers,
Ralf