Re: libtool and mkoctfile

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Nov-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:48 PM, Thomas Weber
| <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
| > I can only wonder that people argue about portability in one sentence,
| > yet don't care about totally different compilers and platforms in the
| > other sentences. You want portability? Use proven tools. And yes,
| > libtool is complex and actually pretty slow when run.
| 
| This might be a drawback. How slow? Some packages require mkoctfile to
| be run a dozen times to build ...

I just timed two separate builds of Octave, one with the automake
patch and one without.  I see (CPU seconds, approximately):

  2900 user, 280 system   without automake/libtool
  2910 user, 300 system   with

That includes 1175 invocations of "libtool: compile:" and 311 of
"libtool: link:".

So the change is really not significant, at least on a system where
running a shell script is fast.  I don't know what the current state
of that is with the Msys shell on a Windows system.

jwe