Re: Temporary files == slowness

[Paul Eggert]

Eric Sunshine <address@hidden> writes:

> This problem used to manifest quite painfully on NextStep and OpenStep (and  
> possibly Rhapsody) with the built-in shell, but it disappeared at some point  
> in the Autoconf 2.5x series of releases, and stayed away even as recently as  
> the 2.57 release.

I'm surprised the problem ever went away, as the subtle quoting
differences between

   cat <<EOF
   $text
   EOF

and echo "$text" make it difficult to replace the former with the latter.

I have Autoconf 2.59 installed, and just did the following with the
autoconf 2.57 source code.

  cp -pr autoconf-2.57 autoconf-2.57-built-with-2.59
  (cd autoconf-2.57-built-with-2.59 && autoconf)
  diff -pru autoconf-2.57/configure autoconf-2.57-built-with-2.59/configure

and didn't see a single change on any line that contained '<<'.  For
what it's worth (which is not much), autoconf-2.57/configure and
autoconf-2.57-built-with-2.59/configure ran at the same speed on my
Debian 3.0r1 box.  So I don't know what the problem is.

Unless someone else pipes up with the real answer then I suppose we'll
have to get to the bottom of this ourselves.  If you have access to an
old host, perhaps you can do the same thing as the above, and run "sh
-x configure" in both directories, and compare the results to see why
one is generating many more temporary files than the other.