On 3 Jul 2000, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Jul 3, 2000, Mo DeJong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I think it might be a good idea to add the -pipe option to the
> > default CFLAGS if gcc is detected and the -pipe option is
> > supported. What do you think?
>
> I think this should not be done by default. -pipe is more
> CPU-intensive than regular builds, so it should be up to the builder
> to decide whether to use it or not. -pipe may work fine on a
> developer's high-end system, but not on Joe User's low-end machine,
> nor in Joe Power User's case of building with `make -j8' to make use
> of his SMP machine.
I think the default should be set for the most common case. The
most common case is someone building on a reasonable machine.
If you have a really lame machine or a supper SMP machine, then
you may need to use something other than the default. If it
makes the build go faster for 99% of the folks out there, we
should use it. If you just add a AC_USE_PIPE_WITH_GCC macro,
who is going to know about it? People would need to add that
macro to old configure.in files to see any improvement.
> However, since there's demand for such a macro, we could supply one
> that would refrain from adding -pipe, even if supported, when a
> configure option such as --disable-pipe is given. But IMHO this macro
> should not be used by default; it's only for those developers that
> *think* they know better than their users, and we should make it clear
> in the docs that this macro is not recommended in general.
Why not make -pipe the default when gcc is detected and add a
--disable-pipe option? That would make it easy to turn off -pipe
if someone wanted to build in some strange way. The only way
defaults are useful is that are actually set as the default :)
If there is a problem with the -pipe option under cygwin, then
lets just not use it under cygwin.
Mo Dejong
Red Hat Inc
