If it starts up the wine environment every time this might take some time.
Try to keep a "notepad" open in the background so the wine environment stays running.
hiya marcus, good advice - sounds reasonable. tried it: wineserver is the top-running process, stays with the same process id. so i don't believe it makes a difference: we're still looking at 20-30 seconds per line from configure.
what i did was utterly utterly nastily cheat: i #ifdef'd most of the lines from python's configure script, for a win32 build! this would normally be an absolute recipe for a horror-story disaster, but, given that there's a preconfigured hard-coded pcbuild.h for visual studio to use, to replace what configure normally does _anyway_, it's a one-off acceptable thing.
this cuts the ./configure time from 2 hours to 10 minutes... :)
l.