Ah! I finally have a progress bar that doesn't stall the build!
- pipe size in Linux is only 8*512=4096 bytes
- pipe size is not setable
- when the feeding process spits out data faster than the eating
process can read it, then the feeding process stalls after 4KiB
of data sent to the pipe
- for us, the progress bar would spawn a sub-shell every line,
and the sub-shell would in turn spawn a 'date' command.
Which was sloooww as hell, and would cause some kind of a
starvation: the pipe was full most of the time, and the
feeding process was stalled all this time.

Now, we use internal variables and a little hack based onan offset
to determine the elapsed time. Much faster this way, but still
CPU-intensive.

--- gcc-4.1.0/libstdc++-v3/include/ext/rope.mps	2006-03-24 01:49:51 +0100

+++ gcc-4.1.0/libstdc++-v3/include/ext/rope	2006-03-24 01:49:37 +0100

@@ -59,6 +59,9 @@

 #include <bits/allocator.h>

 #include <ext/hash_fun.h>

+/* cope w/ index defined as macro, SuSv3 proposal */

+#undef index

+

 # ifdef __GC

 #   define __GC_CONST const

 # else

--- gcc-4.1.0/libstdc++-v3/include/ext/ropeimpl.h.mps	2006-03-24 01:50:04 +0100

+++ gcc-4.1.0/libstdc++-v3/include/ext/ropeimpl.h	2006-03-24 01:50:28 +0100

@@ -53,6 +53,9 @@

 #include <ext/memory> // For uninitialized_copy_n

 #include <ext/numeric> // For power

+/* cope w/ index defined as macro, SuSv3 proposal */

+#undef index

+

 _GLIBCXX_BEGIN_NAMESPACE(__gnu_cxx)

   using std::size_t;