(Following up my own mail...)

Thomas Bieg wrote:
> You measure the output length of the first build
> (by output I mean console messages) with wc, like this:
> 
>    make | wc -c
> 
> Then you get some byte count, say 9999. With that number you
> can "progress" your subsequent builds:
> 
>    make clean
>    make | progress -l 9999 sh -c 'cat >/dev/null'
> 
> (I know that this is not very useful for the "real world",
> just to show what I mean.)

Come to think of it, I actually find this quite useful.

If you have a fast machine on one platform (say i386) and
some really slow thing on another platform (say some hpc with
nfs mounted pkgsrc and swap), you can easily do a test compile
on the fast one to get a rough indication for how long the
build on the slow one will take.

Just for the fun of it, I tried a "progressed compile" of
editors/elvis (which is rather small) using the above method
and besides some jumping of the progress bar at the beginning
and the end it grew quite linearly.

(Of course one would want to preserve the output instead of
just throwing it away.)


Tom