On Sun, 29 Sep 2024, Sad Clouds wrote:
Over the years I got frustrated with autoconf.
It is quite slow, especially on old machines like Sun Ultra 10. It
could take several minutes to run autoconf scripts and then several
seconds to compile some small open source package. If you are
building large number of packages from something like pkgsrc, the
issue is magnified significantly. Even on fast machines with many
CPUs, autoconf inhibits parallelization, as it runs its tests
sequentially and then many packages repeat the same tests over and
over again, it is really bonkers. The issues are quite noticeable
when bulk building many packages.
The Sun Ultra 10 is indeed very old. But my early experiences with
Autoconf started in 1993 on a SPARCclassic "server" (running Solaris
2.1), which is much slower than that. :-)
In order to speed autoconf scripts for tests which always produce the
same answer, one can create a 'config.site' script with cached
results, and refer to it with the CONFIG_SITE environment variable.
If you are bulk-building many packages using similar configuration
options, this will result in a huge speed-up.
A good thing about autoconf is that it almost always produces the
correct answer, and packages depending on autoconf+automake+libtool
are extremely consistent and predictable. I have found that projects
based on CMake are not nearly as consistent and predictable.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
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