Re: speed up large library linking

[Peter O'Gorman]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hi Peter, others,
>
> How may I convince you?

I am not sure that you can convince me to like the temporary file usage, and 
the use of utilitles like paste and join which are neither mentioned in the 
GNU coding standards document or autocnf's portable shell section. The fact 
that the files stick around if the user interrupts the process only makes 
mattters worse. These patches are very destabilizing and, in my opinion, 
make libtool harder to maintain.

Now I have thought about this amost every day since you first posted this 
patch and the speedup is very convincing, I am sure that for you it easily 
convinces you that the patch is necessary. For me it kind of balances the 
scale, at one point last week I was going to give approval to commit when I 
realized that libjava is atypical libtool usage. It's massive number of 
objects exceed kernel limits for command line length on many platforms, I 
have never seen another library do that.

Still given all that, I have been hoping that another libtool maintainer 
would step in and say "OK". I would not object. For "another libtool 
maintainer" I would happily include both Paolo Bonzini and Alexandre Oliva 
(both being gcc maintainers should increase your chances of approval). I 
will note however that Paolo recently committed a patch to gcc to compile 
libjava a directory at a time rather than a file at a time, reducing the 
compile time for libjava dramatically.

Some portions of this patch eliminate unnecessary loops, or have other 
optimizations, I like them, just can't deal with the tempfiles.

Sorry, hope my explination makes some sense. I encourage other maintainers 
to make their feelings clear.

Peter
--
Peter O'Gorman - http://www.pogma.com