Subject: Re: GIT on MinGW problem

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 00:21:47 -0700

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
>> On systems like Cygwin the fork+exec overheads are very high
> A well written configure script is able to detect presence
> of a linkable libcurl. 
>   

IMO the reasons configure is so unwieldy, at least as it's set up in 
most open source projects, are that a) it spends 95% of its time 
checking for things that basically never vary (yes, I have stdlib.h, 
thank you) and that b) it doesn't remember the results from previous 
runs on the same host (I'm just changing the install path; my ints won't 
have stopped being 32 bits as a result.) I wonder if we could satisfy 
most people with a configure script -- maybe not based on autoconf -- 
that is limited in scope to just the things that are currently tweakable 
in the git Makefile.

If configure ran only, say, 10-15 tests, I bet the fork+exec overhead on 
Cygwin would be perfectly tolerable.

-Steve