Firstly - I love your product and have used it for years. I run on the Solaris Sparc platform mostly but use Linux and flavors of Windows at times. My Sun is getting older so both of these suggestions would help developers on less-than-super machines.
1) years ago GCC took about 2 hours to compile, last year it was 26 hours for me, this year I just surpassed 48 hours and it is still going - it would be very nice if one could compile the compiler and what it needs without having to build the entire java set (yes I know it is bigger and better, but don't need all the parts) 2) Much of the time is spent in the several iterations of building a product doing the convfigure steps. These are repeated ad nauseum with the results being obtained the hard way each time. As a database person, it seems to me that by perhaps having a small database of configuration learned things (perhaps 3 key strings and one result string separated by a delimiter that awk recognizes) would allow the configuration to go much faster. I would be happy to write a small shell script that extracts information and another to add to such a database. The developer could then point the make at where this default file is located using an environment variable - make and configure could use it and update it. Many others are using your style configurations and could benefit from such a database (gawk, gdb, .... as well as many others that copy your excellent style). Thanks for doing a great job and making a superb product. Ray Holme
