Re: Paralizing configure

[Miles Bader]

Marian Marinov <address@hidden> writes:
> We can start a new branch and see if it is worth the work. And if it is ok we 
> can then start the upgrade of all the code.
>
> I'm sure that there would be situations in which the tests must remain 
> sequental. However we can isolate them into bigger independent sections of 
> tests.

At the least, constructs like
AC_CHECK_HEADERS([stdint.h unistd.h fcntl.h sys/mman.h sys/stat.h])
could check all the entries in parallel.

Since the main problem is the presence of arbitrary shell code, which
can change the test environment or record it, you could note the
presence of shell code, and mark those locations as synchronization
points.

Unfortunately real-world configure.ac files (particularly the big hairy
ones which could benefit most from parallelization) often seem to be
_mostly_ shell code...

-miles

-- 
Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.