Brian Gough’s Notes
occasional GNU-related news
Autoconf caching – an option I didn’t know about
In his talk about Autotools at the FOSDEM GNU Dev Room, Ralf Wildenheus mentioned an autoconf option that I wasn’t aware of. It’s the “-C” option and it enables caching, which speeds up multiple runs of a ./configure script enormously.
$ ./configure --help
--cache-file=FILE cache test results in FILE [disabled]
-C, --config-cache alias for `--cache-file=config.cache'
$ ./configure -C configure: loading cache config.cache ...
Caching used to be the default up to about 10 years ago, but was turned off as the cache gets out of sync with the system if new packages are installed. Also it really only benefits developers, as end-users typically only need to run ./configure once.
In the 1990’s I got used to caching being enabled by default and when it was turned off I never noticed the change — except that somehow running ./configure while developing seemed a lot slower in the past ten years!
Thanks to Ralf for pointing out this option as I am now using -C all the time.