I've started such an effort in nvm.stripped. Beginning with:
* botan (because I know that from earlier upgrades)
* pcre (because it was so easy)
* lua (becasue I'm been afraid of the problems you mentioned)
That sounds great, I'll give it a go on my system.
The m4 scripts for botan and lua are stolen from the library-build build
branch and adjusted. I'm not an m4 hacker, so if some m4 guru could
check those that'd be great.
Me neither, but I'll have a look and see if I notice anything.
I didn't do sha1 benchmarks, but those should now use the assembler
optimized variants.
I'm curious to see how these go. I've been rattling emails off of Jack trying to get both the sha1_ia32 and sha1_sse2 modules to properly configure on my pentium-m and I think that's now working so I'll see how they perform here. Initial tests with botan seem to show that ia32 asm is faster than sse2 on pentium-m which seemed a bit odd.
After just having upgraded (and now landed) monotone's included botan to
1.7.12. Jack is already approaching 1.7.15 with yet another set of
renaming. I'm rather going to use the nvm.stripped branch than continue
to manually upgrade again.
I noticed that gentoo only has 1.6.5 or something so I'll see if I can encourage someone in portage land to get the botan dev stuff in as unstable.
Cheers,
Derek