Re: Faster install-sh in C

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 11:20:07AM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Am Freitag, 4. März 2005 01:11 schrieb Neil Conway:
> > Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > I wrote an "install" program in C. It's supposed to replace the
> > > config/install-sh script, limited to the functionality we need, i.e.
> > > what is in Makefiles in the Pg main source tree. The main objective of
> > > this exercise is to reduce "make install" execution time; a part of that
> > > is being able to install multiple files with one command.
> >
> > What's the status of this patch?

I was playing a little with Make just before leaving, but since I'm
hardly an expert I was having difficulty making it all work. Also,
because I need to include bits from both the source dir and the build
dir (to get get_progname from the port dir and signal handling from
libpq), it was getting somewhat ugly. With a little more effort it can
be made to work cleanly.

> I'm not convinced that this is the best approach. Apparently, PostgreSQL is
> about the only project that is somehow bothered by this. It would be more
> productive to find out why we can't use the system install and find fixes for
> that.

Well, apparently everyone says the system install is not portable and
the discussion stops there. Probably some projects need a sh install
because they don't require a compiler, but we do; we won't require
anything beyond what we already do to have a C install. Maybe most
projects don't install a lot of files like we do, or maybe people just
don't care. (Neither did I care back when installing all headers wasn't
the default behaviour.) I do care now.

And given that the work is mostly already done, I don't see why we
couldn't use it.

> Anyway, if you want to speed up your installation today, just override the
> INSTALL variable by hand.

This doesn't solve the fact that the INSTALL program is called once for
each file in the include directories.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[(at)]dcc(dot)uchile(dot)cl>)
Y una voz del caos me habló y me dijo
"Sonríe y sé feliz, podría ser peor".
Y sonreí. Y fui feliz.
Y fue peor.