[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 06:59:04AM -0700, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> On 05/21/2013 03:49 AM, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> >On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 12:28:53PM +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> >>On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 11:38:08AM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> >>>On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 11:31:20AM +0200, Michael Adam wrote:
> >>>>Hi Andrew,
> >>>>
> >>>>I agree that 4.1 would be a good opportunity to remove the
> >>>>support for the autoconf build, as I am personally confident
> >>>>enough with the waf build as the major build system.
> >>>>
> >>>>But I think before taking the step, we should verify
> >>>>the current state of the config results - the bug #8969
> >>>>you mentioned has not been updated in a long time.
> >>>>
> >>>>And maybe we can get some voices here of people using
> >>>>Samba file servers on various Unixes and of the distributors
> >>>>(of Linux, but also BSD flavours maybe).
> >>>Can we make it easier to compile just one binary, for
> >>>example smbtorture or so? I am right now messing with talloc
> >>>for example, and if I change talloc.h, it will recompile
> >>>almost everything before it even thinks about linking
> >>>smbstatus. Also, the startup time even on a beefy laptop is
> >>>several seconds before it even starts *something*. This
> >>>makes coding central components much more tedious than with
> >>>the autoconf build.
> >>>
> >>>I know that from an ivory tower perspective changing
> >>>talloc.h requires rebuilding everything, but in my real
> >>>world I know what I'm doing and I don't need 100% precision.
> >>>What I need is quick turnaround with a possible fallback to
> >>>git clean -dxf.
> >>IIRC
> >>
> >>./buildtools/bin/waf build --targets=smbtorture
> >Thanks!
> >
> >That does save linking of all non-involved libs and
> >binaries, but it will still compile everything first. At
> >least it did, when I last tried.
> Have you tried the gold linker ? Micheal suggested me at XP and I
> must confess that it makes things way more faster when linking.
> For the moment wafbuild is only able to use the system linker but it
> should be very hard to teach him how to use another linker for the
> one who don't want to use it by default (the gold linker)
You might also want to try --as-needed with the standard linker
(-Wl,--as-needed). The gold linker does that by default.

Cheers,

Jelmer