Re: GNU make or portable make?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Tom,

* Tom Tromey wrote on Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:21:19AM CEST:
> The "make" part of the build parallelizes well, but the configure part
> does not.

Yet.

> I think that is the big problem today.  It is particularly
> noticeable in big trees like gcc or gdb.

Both of whose build systems could use a bit of love, but yes, granted.

> GNU make could help solve this.  See quagmire for a random stab at this
> idea.  It isn't the most pleasant programming environment, but then
> neither is the m4+shell combination ;-).  I'm sure there are other
> workable approaches as well.

As much as I have sympathy with you for quagmire, I don't think it's the
way I would go (wouldn't have said so had you not brought it up ;-)
If one chooses to ditch the current system and start anew, I think it
should both be simpler to program in, and it should have the right
complexity for the edit-compile-test cycle even in very large trees,
which so far only tup[1] has, but that again doesn't fulfill a lot of
other needs.

But again, I don't think autoconf is at the end of the road in enabling
more Posix and XSI shell, nor have we seriously tried parallelism there
yet (but now we have experience from Autotest).

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.make.general/7667>