It is obvious you have never built any of these packages by hand. Almost all OSS packages today use the GNU configure scripts to configure them for building on a BUNCH of difference platforms. Linux being just one. These scripts build the actual makefiles that are used to compile the package on the fly.
All gentoo's ebuild system does really is put a bunch of wrappers around the standard build scripts that each package uses. To do what you ask would require that the EVERY package (or most), to be modified to check a system database of available functions. No such database exists, on all unices, and if it did using it would not be as reliable as actually testing to see if the required function is available. I would not expect this to change. It works amazingly well across an amazing large set of platforms, and frankly, is once of the great "portability" achievements of the FSF. Lincoln On Sun, 2003-03-30 at 22:14, Collins Richey wrote: > On Sun, 30 Mar 2003 22:09:24 -0500 > "Jeremy Schneider" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I've noticed that when I do makes, a lot of time is spent by the > > system checking lots of stuff: > > ... > > checking for a BSD-compatible install... /bin/install -c > > checking whether build environment is sane... yes > > checking for gawk... gawk > > checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes > > checking for i586-pc-linux-gnu-strip... no > > checking for strip... strip > > checking for i586-pc-linux-gnu-gcc... gcc > > ... > > > > It occurs to me that these things don't change very often on my > > system, and that the answer to these checks could be cached, perhaps > > associated with a hash or date of certain config files, such as > > make.conf. Does this make any sense, or is it too unworkable and/or > > risky? > > > > I've always wondered about that myself. It's a lot of repetitive work > for every install. > > -- > Collins > > -- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- Lincoln A. Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
