Re: dh --parallel (was: Re: RFS: lebiniou)
On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:06:00 +0800
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Tony Houghton wrote:
>
> > I agree, but there's another big problem: autoconf. It runs far more
> > tests than most projects need (especially when using glib which
> > takes care of a large range of compatibility issues for you), and
> > each run takes longer than the actual compilation with a modest 4
> > core CPU. When building roxterm I think I have to run configure 4
> > times: before making a tarball with make dist, at the start of
> > debuild before it can make clean, then once for each version of
> > gtk. On top of all that you often have to run bootstrap.sh first.
>
> Best file a couple of bugs about that on autoconf upstream:
>
> Please implement autoreconf -jX
> Please implement ./configure -jX
I don't think it's practical to add parallelism to autoconf. Parts of
configure scripts depend on earlier tests etc and the syntax doesn't
provide a way of specifying dependencies like make does. I think
anything that tried to parallelise what configure does would be too
complicated. Better to just replace it with something that keeps the
number of tests to a minimum and is "cleaner" instead of bodging m4 and
sh together.
I think writing build scripts in a language like python is very nice
(autoconf is too slow, let's use python, spot the irony :)) but I've
found waf and scons don't really suit my needs. So I'm writing my own
which combines python with a simple and flexible concept of make-like
rules and dependencies.
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