I actually don't know anything about autoconf/automake etc, so can't really help you. sorry.
However, I have noticed the following when linking the main executable on mingw (this is the output from 'time make lyx-qt.exe'): standard link time: real 3m31.984s user 0m15.507s sys 0m11.529s link time with -Wl,--export-all-symbols removed from LDFLAGS real 1m34.656s user 0m15.273s sys 0m11.726s NOTE: This is for link only, all objects & libraries are already compiled I realise time is hardly a sophisticated measurement tool, but the results are pretty significant. These results are for my 3.2GHz P4 with 1Gb RAM. Still not as fast on my much crappier Linux box, but an improvment. Does anybody have a good reason for enabling this option? If not, I suggest it is removed from the LDFLAGS for linking the executable. Like I said, I don't know how to do this. andrew
