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-4.1.2.orig/libstdc++-v3/include/c_std/std_cstdio.h	2005-10-30 23:21:50.000000000 +0100

 +++ gcc-4.1.2/libstdc++-v3/include/c_std/std_cstdio.h	2007-03-04 23:33:27.000000000 +0100

 @@ -143,7 +143,7 @@

    using ::vsprintf;

  }

 -#if _GLIBCXX_USE_C99

 +#if _GLIBCXX_USE_C99 || defined(__UCLIBC__)

  #undef snprintf

  #undef vfscanf