groan: installation

[Jeff Sturm]

On 3 Nov 2002, Adam Megacz wrote:
> Ant is to make as c++ is to c.  You generally start out by using ant
> as a "better make than make" by simply rewriting each make target as
> an ant target (quite easy to do).  The optional <bash/> task helps a
> lot with this transition.  You then gradually, incrementally improve
> your build process by taking advantage of ant's more structured
> approach and better filesets/dependencies.

Perhaps, but this is sounding like a red herring: the discussion was about
build times.

I tried a "rm -f libgcj.la && make libgcj.la" in my build tree.  Here are
the timings for a --disable-shared build:

88 seconds waiting for libtool to make up its mind
10 seconds for ar to create libgcj.a from 1754 object files
4 seconds for ranlib

It's pretty clear where the inefficiency lies.  If you could concoct a
portable Ant build file without libtool it'd likely be faster, but then
you could do the same with make.

Jeff