We're out of tree codes; now what?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> writes:

Alexandre> As for configure scripts...  autoconf -j is long overdue ;-)

Yeah.  The ideal, I think, would be to have configure just record the
options the user passed it, and then have the majority of actual
checks integrated into the build.  That way, e.g., you could
parallelize tests, checks that are not needed for a particular
configuration would never be run, etc.  If there was a single make
instance, you could even share the results and avoid re-running
checks.

But, implementing this is a very big job and it seems unlikely to ever
happen.

One thing I've noticed is that we do run many checks multiple times.
We could probably reduce this by rearranging the source tree a bit.
Also there are some redundant checks for things like "build system
sanity", which aren't cached; perhaps a new autoconf feature to let us
disable this stuff in all the subdirs would help a little.  I suspect
this may all be tinkering around the margins though.

I also wonder how much dead code is in there.  In libjava I know we
basically never try to garbage collect old, unused checks.

Tom