[petsc-dev] Why does configure need 30 minutes to remind me about --known-mpi-shared-libraries?

[Barry Smith]

   What the hey is configure doing for 30 minutes before it gets to this point? On my machine it gets to this point in a few seconds, a minute at the most.

    Could there be some way to profile these “take forever for configure to run” cases so we know what is actually going on so we can improve the configure process for everyone who has these terrible systems?

    Could having shorter paths help?

   Barry


  How about having the first step of ./configure copy over the entire software stack of compilers, include files etc to a local filesystem (take say 4 minutes) and then run locally take say 2 minutes rather than this one hour to run remotely bullshit?


On Apr 4, 2014, at 12:15 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> *******************************************************************************
>         UNABLE to CONFIGURE with GIVEN OPTIONS    (see configure.log for details):
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Must give a default value for known-mpi-shared-libraries since executables cannot be run
> *******************************************************************************
> 
> 
> Matt, is there something consistent and maintainable that we could do so
> that all the checks for issues like this run immediately, before
> compilation tests, so that users can get error messages in a reasonable
> amount of time?  Few things are more frustrating than waiting so long to
> get a trivial error message, then start the entire process over again.
> 
> And/or, what about caching results so that re-running after adding this
> flag would be fast?  (It scares me too, but I consider configure time to
> be a major usability issue.)