On Tuesday 01 May 2007 13:02, Claus Reinke wrote:
[...] would it be possible to have a "configuration package" with nothing but the common checks? then every package, and ghc itself, could depend on that package being there, and every package configure could modularly use the information from that package. [...]
That would be the wrong approach, autoconf already has the relevant mechanisms: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Caching-Results.html http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Cache-Files.html Basically, this boils down to using the AC_CACHE_BLAH macros in all time-consuming places (we do this, at least most of the time) and pass down the cache file location through the directory hierarchy (You won't achieve caching between siblings in the build hierarchy, but I am not sure if this is a real problem). This is what configure usually does, but I guess that some things have been broken by the recent changes in the build system, so that currently caching is not very effective. My personal opinion is: Compared to the whole build time, the configuration checks are ridiculously fast, and doing arcane things to speed this up is not worth the trouble. Cheers, S.