Re: Avoid certain spurious `testsuite' rebuilds

[Paul Eggert]

Noah Misch <address@hidden> writes:

> On my middle-aged PC running GNU/Linux, rebuilding
> `testsuite' takes 22 seconds.

It takes 16 real seconds on my 4-year-old PC (2.4 GHz P4).  Of that,
15 real seconds are spent running autom4te.

> To me, saving that 22 second delay before I can run a test case
> after editing Autoconf sources is worth this amount of Makefile
> pain.  What do you think?

'make check' overall takes 13 minutes 41 seconds on my host; saving 16
seconds would be nice if it didn't have all that timestamp gimmickry
but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle, once you look at the big
picture.

How about if we speed up autom4te instead?  OK, OK, so I'm only half
serious.  But let's face it, Autoconf is Way Too Slow in general, and
autom4te is one of the offenders.

Another possibility, I suppose, would be to put those auto-generated
*.at files back into CVS, maintain them by hand, and have 'make check'
verify that they're correct.