Re: automake less verbose (iter 3)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Jan Engelhardt wrote on Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 04:02:06PM CET:
> On Sunday 2009-03-08 10:01, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >> 
> >> Well newlines can easily be avoided by getting rid of all the
> >> continuation lines within an if block and writing the full command
> >> lines out on every line. Yes, redundancy, but it's what it takes.
> >
> >Yes but that has the downside of enlarging some Makefile.in files by
> >quite a bit.  This is important, when some files end up being in the MB
> >range.
> 
> Perhaps postprocessing configure with a tool (that understands
> shell syntax) that removes all unneeded whitespace.

configure size doesn't grow much with the number of Makefile.in files,
nor with their size.  Also, while there's typically quite some extra
whitespace in configure scripts, its amount is not relevant when
compared to the script size; so improving upon that should be done for
readability purposes only.  OTOH, current git Autoconf saves much more
in configure script size than could be saved by whitespace compression,
due to using shell functions.

Cheers,
Ralf