[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] New build system

[Hendrik Leppkes]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 9:05 PM Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
>
> Hendrik Leppkes (2018-06-14):
> > I don't mind make itself, for me its configure thats the real problem.
> > Its extremely slow (we're talking minutes), for me often taking longer
> > then the actual compilation (especially with ccache) - and that is
> > really extremely painful.
>
> IIRC, a change from the fork that was merged in the last few months made
> configure much much slower. It could bear investigating.
>
> Yet, the arguments for make apply to configure too: it is written in
> standard shell script, not some newfangled system that only a few people
> know.
>

And that exactly is the problem. Shell is horrible for this. It wants
to be a real programming language but it just isn't.
You could re-write configure in any actual language and so many of
these problems would just be gone, and keep the remaining part of the
build system as-is even.

- Hendrik