Configuring Alien::SDL 1.446 takes an exorbitant amount of time

[ryandesign]

Hello, I'm a developer with the MacPorts project, and I noticed that configuring Alien::SDL 1.446 takes an exorbitant amount of time. My Mac is not a slow computer: it has a quad-core Intel Core i7 at 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM and an SSD. But for some reason each checking for line that checks for a library is taking over half a minute to complete, during which time the perl executable is using most of one CPU core; I would expect each of these checks to take only a small fraction of a second. The result is that a configure run that I would expect to complete in a few seconds actually takes over 13 minutes. Here is output showing this, using the moreutils command ts to prepend each line of output with the number of seconds it took to print that line of output, and the OS time command to show how long the whole configure run took:

$ sudo port clean p5.20-alien-sdl && sudo port patch p5.20-alien-sdl && time sudo port -v configure p5.20-alien-sdl 2>&1 | ts -i %.s
--->  Cleaning p5.20-alien-sdl
--->  Fetching distfiles for p5.20-alien-sdl
--->  Verifying checksums for p5.20-alien-sdl
--->  Extracting p5.20-alien-sdl
--->  Applying patches to p5.20-alien-sdl
3.403645 --->  Computing dependencies for p5.20-alien-sdl.
0.014277 --->  Configuring p5.20-alien-sdl
0.333081 Unknown option: installdirs
0.000075 Unknown option: config
0.000020 Unknown option: config
0.000017 Welcome to Alien::SDL module installation
0.000014 -----------------------------------------
0.000014 checking operating system... darwin
0.000013 checking for /usr/bin/clang... yes
0.000015 checking build system type... darwin-thread-multi-2level
0.000026 checking platform specific module... using 'My::Builder::Unix'
0.270378 checking SDL_INST_DIR env var... no
0.016143 checking for config script... yes, sdl-config
40.181088 checking for pthread... yes
35.215019 checking for SDL... yes
36.186098 checking for z... yes
34.336373 checking for jpeg... yes
34.379797 checking for tiff... yes
35.542220 checking for png... yes
35.778359 checking for SDL_image... yes
34.804934 checking for ogg... yes
36.254851 checking for vorbis... yes
34.568090 checking for vorbisfile... yes
34.320654 checking for SDL_mixer... yes
34.777106 checking for freetype... yes
35.945070 checking for SDL_ttf... yes
35.700856 checking for SDL_gfx... yes
35.472131 checking for pangoft2... yes
34.953558 checking for pango... yes
34.853088 checking for gobject... yes
34.848642 checking for gmodule... yes
37.358166 checking for glib... yes
36.084040 checking for fontconfig... yes
35.033475 checking for expat... yes
36.075795 checking for SDL_Pango... yes
0.000810 checking for prebuilt binaries... no
0.000097 
0.000060 You have the following options:
0.000026 
0.000039 What way do you wanna go? [1 ]1 
0.092477 Using already installed SDL ver=1.2.15 path=/opt/local
0.000080 Created MYMETA.yml and MYMETA.json
0.000021 Creating new 'Build' script for 'Alien-SDL' version '1.446'

real    13m6.895s
user    2m25.720s
sys 7m57.116s

Some system info which might be relevant:

$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.10.3
BuildVersion:   14D136

$ xcodebuild -version
Xcode 6.3.1
Build version 6D1002

$ cc -v
Apple LLVM version 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.49) (based on LLVM 3.6.0svn)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin14.3.0
Thread model: posix