Re: configure -C by default?

[Vincent Torri]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2011, Eric Blake wrote:

> On 02/06/2011 03:11 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > Apparently, a lot of users do not even know about configure -C aka.
> > --config-cache which of course doesn't help Autoconf's reputation about
> > producing configure scripts which are slow even for development.
> >
> > So one question would be what about making -C the default?
> > We could have --force or --no-cache to turn it off.
>
> I prefer to keep it off by default, but wouldn't mind advertising that
> (when used correctly) it does provide great speedups within a single
> project.

I was at FOSDEM and i indeed didn't know that option before Ralf's talk. 
About using it correctly, is there some doc or tutorial about its usage ?

> Personally, I use it all the time.  It makes a HUGE difference for
> cygwin, but even on Linux, it is a noticeable speed improvement.

I use MSYS a lot, so if it can speed up configure time, it would help me a 
lot

thank you

Vincent Torri

>  And
> yes, stale caches are still very much a real issue - cross-package
> caches are too dangerous, and I have run into issues where stale caches
> bite me (for example, if gnulib enhances a configure test that marks a
> platform's function as non-compliant where it used to be compliant);
> I've gotten into the habit of nuking config.cache any time I update
> gnulib as a result.
>
> --
> Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
> Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org