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-4.0.0/libstdc++-v3/configure-old	2005-04-30 22:04:48.061603912 -0500

 +++ gcc-4.0.0/libstdc++-v3/configure	2005-04-30 22:06:13.678588152 -0500

 @@ -7194,6 +7194,9 @@

  cat >>conftest.$ac_ext <<_ACEOF

  /* end confdefs.h.  */

  #include <complex.h>

 +#ifdef __UCLIBC__

 +#error ugly hack to make sure configure test fails here for cross until uClibc supports the complex funcs

 +#endif

  int

  main ()

  {