Re: Parallelization of shell scripts for 'configure' etc.

[Dale R. Worley]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> In many Gnu projects, the 'configure' script is the biggest barrier to 
> building because it takes soooo long to run. Is there some way that we 
> could improve its performance without completely reengineering it, by 
> improving Bash so that it can parallelize 'configure' scripts?

It seems to me that bash provides the needed tools -- "( ... ) &" lets
you run things in parallel.  Similarly, if you've got a lot of small
tasks with a complex web of dependencies, you can encode that in a
"makefile".

It seems to me that the heavy work is rebuilding how "configure" scripts
are constructed based on which items can be run in parallel.  I've never
seen any "metadocumentation" that laid out how all that worked.

Dale