Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Karsten Behrmann <BearPerson AT gmx.net>]

Hey guys!
I dunno if this is the right time for this request, but I've had some
requests (and done some thinking) on configure caching.
Considering that for small spells configure takes twice as long as the
actual build and e.g. on a nice quad-opteron is the only time delay
you notice in a cast (1 minute configure, 3 seconds build), we maybe
ought to think about adding configure caching.

The only thing that needs to be done is to pass
--cache-file=/usr/share/config.cache to ./configure.
At least that's how it should be. Unfortunately, the cache can be
invalidated by changing CFLAGS (so spells modifying CFLAGS should
better not use config.cache at all...), which configure detects
and bails out. A possible solution would be to delete the cache file
if configure failed and to run it again. (maybe query)

A more severe problem is that libs could change, configure cannot detect
this. Therefore, I would suggest adding a "NO-LIBRARY" spell option
that tells sorcery not to delete the configure cache after that cast.
(because library changes can render the cache useless, it should be
deleted by default)

Of course, this would require modifications to spells and build_api
to use this feature, though if nicely designed no spells should
be broken if we phase it in.

A downside would be that we could not detect if the configure failed
because the environment (CFLAGS et al) changed or because it simply
failed out. The return code at least seems to be 1 in both cases.

Ideas?

So Far,
  Karsten

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