Quantifying the time overhead of Cygwin make

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 11:47:41PM +0200, Michael Stahl wrote:
> IV. Conclusion
> 
> Using a native Win32 GNU make provides faster from-scratch rebuilds than
> any previous attempt to improve build performance, and significantly
> reduces the incremental re-build overhead of make on Windows by a factor
> of 2x-3x.
> 
> Since there are not many developers using Windows anyway, i'd propose to
> have a flag day to switch to requiring Win32 make on master, dropping
> support for Cygwin make.
> 
> This gerrit patch does the switch:
> https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/9698/
> 
> Of course, this first requires preparing tinderboxes, and testing by
> others if the Win32 make works well everywhere; please do so if you are
> able to do a Windows build of LO.

first off: thanks for the excellent analysis! I know this stuff is a lot of
boring work when done properly. It seems switching to a native GNU make on
Windows is the right way to go, but of course leave the ultimate decision about
a flagday to those working primarily on that platform.

In the long run we might add our local patches to the native make again, if its
worth it (maybe?), but that can be done incrementally. Also incrementally, we
might reduce our dependency on cygwin in general (you are still using it as a
POSIX environment, are you?) and slowly move to use/be able to use something
smaller and selfcontained[1] like GnuWin32 or even busybox. Apart from possibly
simplifying build env setup, its always good to have the build system not to
depend too hard on one implementation (cygwin).

Best,

Bjoern

[1] And thus easier to maintain for upstream.