Can you skip the “checking..” steps when running ./configure?

Question

 

$ ./configure
configure: configuring for GNU Wget 1.11
checking build system type... i686-apple-darwin10.0.0
checking host system type... i686-apple-darwin10.0.0
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking for gcc... gcc

Is there a way to skip the "checking.." messages when running configure? I know the checks are there for a reason, but when wanting to quickly compile something, it's a pain to have to wait while configure is "checking for AIX" or if the compiler supports the long data-type.. I guess not, since the checks are probably used to determine paths for gcc etc etc..

I know you can silence the messages with --quiet but this is not what I'm looking for,

  -q, --quiet, --silent   do not print `checking...' messages

Answer 1

./configure can be told to cache the results of the checks with the option -C, see here.

Answer 2

autoconf is used to provide a way of determining the capabilities of the host on which the application is being compiled. Skipping these checks would imply it doesn't know what the capabilities of the build target.

As mentioned above, you can cache the results but you'd need to run it at least once to prime the cache.