Last year in India Simon showed me an ancient and well hidden qmake feature. With this hidden feature you can easily move some files to a new library.

Why is this good? Well, the new library only contains the files you are currently working on. In most of the cases this will be only a hand full. You will get blazing fast linking and round trip times if you do so.

So today I worked on a issue with SVGFont.cpp and my roundtrip time was way too slow. So I decided to apply this hack to our superb autotools based buildsystem!

So I have a hacky patch which is turning noinst libraries to normal libraries to avoid the running of ar/ranlib. I have created a libWebCoreHack.la, GtkLauncher and DumpRenderTree link to that library now. And you have to move the sources you work on from webcore_sources to webcorehack_sources. With this hack I have almost instant turn around times again.

How to use it: Whenever you work on a area move the usual suspects to the webcorehack_sources, relink once and then you can benefit from the fast link times.

*happy*