[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] configure: much faster configure --help

[Alexander Strasser]

Hi Erik,

Erik Auerswald wrote:
> MPlayer's configure does a lot of work before checking command line
> options. This includes updating of an ffmpeg git repository before
> producing help output, even when only asked for help.
> 
> The attached patch rearranges configure's help output code to be in
> front of ffmpeg repo checks and updates and introduces a new check,
> if the first command line option is --help or -h and prints the help
> immediately.
> 
> This drastically speeds up checking for available configure options,
> if done the common way of "./configure --help". If the --help resp.
> -h option is somewhere else on configure's command line, the (kept)
> existing check will find this after doing all the initial setup
> work, taking much longer overall.

  sounds useful to me.

> Index: configure
> ===================================================================
> --- configure	(revision 35910)
> +++ configure	(working copy)
[...]
> +if test "( $1 = --help ) || ( $1 = -h )" ; then
> +    show_help
> +fi

  You should also check for "-help" here. Else the option behaves
differently when given as the first argument.

  BTW did it work for you in both cases? The if-condition looks fishy to me.
Instead of using the if-keyword it might be more practical to duplicate the
case from the option parsing loop, just with the one entry looking for the
help options only.

[...]

  Otherwise LGTM.

  Alexander

PS.
Note that I am not the MPlayer configure maintainer.