Re: 1.16.90 regression: configure now takes 7 seconds to start

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2024, at 10:19 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> Literally as I type this I am
>> watching gettext 0.22 run its ridiculous number of configure scripts a
>> second time from inside `make`.
>
> You can run into such problems:
>   - if you take a tarball of a git repository that contains the generated
>     'configure' file, or

Closely related scenario for me: building from a *checkout* of a git repository
that contains the generated configure files.  This is very common for
Linux distributions and I think we have to do what we can to facilitate it.

> That might be overkill. For simple packages with 1 configure script,
> the following is sufficient in my experience:
>
>   # Bring the time stamps into an order that will not require autoconf, 
> automake, etc. to run again.
>   sleep 1; touch aclocal.m4
>   sleep 1; touch configure
>   sleep 1; touch config.h.in
>   sleep 1; touch `find . -name Makefile.in -type f`

I think that if we are going to bother addressing this at all (and I currently
think we *should*, see above), we need to handle the general case.  Isn't that
the whole point of Automake, that it deals with this kind of annoying detail
*correctly*, so that all its users don't have to worry about it?

(Why *does* gettext need seven configure scripts, anyway?)

zw