Re: Parallelization of shell scripts for 'configure' etc.

[Alex Ameen]

You can try to use the `requires` toposort routine to identify "Strongly Connected Sub-Components", which is where I imagine you'll get the best results. What you'll need to watch out for is undeclared ordering requirements that parallelism would break.

The `m4sh` and `m4sugar` source code is documented in a lot of detail. The manuals exclude that type of documentation because it's internal; but you could keep yourself occupied for at least a month or two before you ran out of topics to explore. 

On Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 8:45 PM Dale R. Worley <worley@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> In many Gnu projects, the 'configure' script is the biggest barrier to
> building because it takes soooo long to run. Is there some way that we
> could improve its performance without completely reengineering it, by
> improving Bash so that it can parallelize 'configure' scripts?

It seems to me that bash provides the needed tools -- "( ... ) &" lets
you run things in parallel.  Similarly, if you've got a lot of small
tasks with a complex web of dependencies, you can encode that in a
"makefile".

It seems to me that the heavy work is rebuilding how "configure" scripts
are constructed based on which items can be run in parallel.  I've never
seen any "metadocumentation" that laid out how all that worked.

Dale