On 1/28/21 9:44 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
One big question is whether you are going to think of your
configuration step as:
* linear script with a parallel part in it (i.e. call make from shell), or
* a parallel system with a linear part in it (i.e. call shell from make)
We need both.
If we're going to do this as an upward-compatible extension to Autoconf,
one way to move forward is to think of the current 'configure' script as
a top-level linear script, and your goal as a software developer will be
to parallelize it as much as possible. Presumably you'd do that by
invoking a new Autoconf macro; this macro would run 'make -j' (i.e.,
call make from shell) and each 'make' rule (running in parallel) would
typically invoke the shell (i.e., call shell from make). This could even
nest further, though I expect that'd be relatively rare. I assume we'd
need variants of AC_REQUIRE that help us do dependencies better (I'm
handwaving here...).
If we're going to do an incompatible replacement for Autoconf there are
surely many other possibilities.
