Re: Unbelievably slow 'configure' runs on Digital Unix 4.0d

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

On 18 Feb 2003, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Hans-Bernhard Broeker <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Kicking it in the rump to make sure it uses /bin/ksh instead of /bin/sh
> > seems to help, and it seems to remember that for a while.
> 
> How do you kick it?  

If only I remembered precisely...  I think I may not even have done
anything myself, other than trying all kinds of ways to re-run the
configuration stuff. I'm not even sure I ever so much as _mentioned_
/bin/ksh in the first place.

After that run yesterday, which took about 2 hours to finish, I now have a
topdir/buildsubdir/config.status that says:

#! /bin/ksh

in the first line, and

SHELL=${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/ksh}

further into the file.

So if I now cd into topdir/bildsubdir and run ./config.status --recheck,
it decides to run ../configure using /bin/ksh.

I found a snippet in ./configure that seems to search for a suitable
shell, and override CONFIG_SHELL for me:

  for as_base in sh bash ksh sh5; do
         case $as_dir in
         /*)
           if ("$as_dir/$as_base" -c '
[...]

This snippet seems to come from /usr/local/share/autoconf/m4sugar/m4sh.m4,
macro _AS_LINENO_PREPARE.  This and the fact that I only began to see this
slowdown after I switched over to autoconf-2.57 (from 2.13) suggests that
the new code related to line number reporting in configure (-->
configure.lineno) may be the root of this problem.  It set CONFIG_SHELL
for me, but the automatic re-making rules in builddir/Makefile don't seem
to manage to propagate that fact far enough.

> Perhaps it would be better to put this into your
> .profile:
> 
> export CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh

This would stop the gap for me, I guess.  But I don't quite regard that
as a suitable solution.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (address@hidden)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.