>>>>> Ray Holme writes: Ray> 2) Much of the time is spent in the several iterations of building a Ray> product doing the convfigure steps. These are repeated ad nauseum with the Ray> results being obtained the hard way each time. As a database person, it Ray> seems to me that by perhaps having a small database of configuration Ray> learned things (perhaps 3 key strings and one result string separated by a Ray> delimiter that awk recognizes) would allow the configuration to go much Ray> faster. I would be happy to write a small shell script that extracts Ray> information and another to add to such a database. The developer could Ray> then point the make at where this default file is located using an Ray> environment variable - make and configure could use it and update it. Many Ray> others are using your style configurations and could benefit from such a Ray> database (gawk, gdb, .... as well as many others that copy your excellent Ray> style).
As mentioned in another message, the user shell can contribute to a lot of the time. Sometimes the default system shell is very inefficient and the configuration time could be improved by using GNU Bash. Also, the configuration process may look repetitive, but the results might be different in each situation, so GCC needs to inquire conservatively. David