Hi Greg,

Hi, I was wondering if there is a way to force ports to use the -C option when running configure. It would speed up the compilation process a whole lot, and there's no reason for configure to run the same tests over and over, especially during the installing of a single port.

If you're talking about doing this in a Portfile, then, as per the portfile(7) manpage, you can use configure.args "<other_arguments> -C <other_arguments>" or alternatively configure.args-append "<other_arguments> -C <other_arguments>" if you're in a context in which you need to avoid clobbering other arguments to configure. If, for some reason, -C or some other flag needs to go before the main set of arguments, you can use configure.pre_args(-append), or if it needs to go after the target, you can use configure.post_args(-append). On the other hand, if you're talking about overriding the flags on the command line, you can just specify them at the end, e.g.: sudo port install <port> configure.args="<other_args> -C <other_args>" I imagine that configure.args-append will also work, but I haven't tested it yet (I really should). I'm curious, however, as to which port or ports you're experiencing this problem with, as it seems to me that this might be better reported to the upstream maintainers. Speaking only for myself, I've noticed that the various ports related to the Courier project (courier-imapd, courier-authlib, maildrop) run a separate instance of configure in each subdirectory of the unpacked source, and I don't imagine that forcing caching will help in this case, as the cache from the previous run of configure won't appear in the directory in which the new run of configure occurs. (I've really been meaning to contact them about this too; it's the only project that I can recall building where the configure time significantly exceeds the compile time.) Kind regards, Maun Suang -- Boey Maun Suang (Boey is my surname) Mobile: +61 403 855 677 Email: boeyms@fastmail.fm

Hi Greg,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but since I don't want to override the default configure arguments I think I want to use configure.args- append="-C", correct?

You're absolutely right, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get configure.args-append to work from the command line, and the only other way that I can think of doing it would be to modify the Portfile, which is obviously not a user-configurable option. If you only needed to set -C for a single port, I'd be happy to look into getting it done, but if you're talking about an install-wide preference, that's currently beyond my ability to implement. In any case, unless you're running on an old machine or are continually running builds, I don't think many ports would lose much time by not having -C set (but for a contrast, see the Courier-related ports -- my limited testing suggested a useful time reduction for them). Kind regards, Maun Suang -- Boey Maun Suang (Boey is my surname) Email: boeyms@macports.org