[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Volker Lendecke]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 08:14:52PM +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> I appreciate your willingness to work on a solution for your concerns
> here, as I think you understand your specific needs best.  I'm always
> happy to advise, and it will be really good to move this from the
> general to the specific as we discuss what exact patches we could apply
> to improve your situation.

So to summarize, I have a few complaints:

Long startup time: No idea where the time is spent, but 6
seconds on a clean build seems really excessive.

Always compile everything before linking: I'm told that this
is due to broken dependencies, but I haven't followed this
exactly. I had thought that the main advantage of waf over
autoconf is that it is perfect with dependencies, so I
probably have just not listened right. If waf's way to
dependency perfection is to compile almost everything
always, I think that should be doable with autoconf as well.

Compile individual C files: It seems not possible without a
gross hack to compile just one file on demand without all
that long startup phase etc.

Change CFLAGS between runs: Nobody has commented on this one
so far.

The first two are certainly the most annoying ones, but
probably the two that are hardest to fix. If Tridge failed
to fix something (startup time), this is my very definition
of "unfixable". So I can only ask everybody to keep the old
build system around.

Thanks,

Volker

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