consider using an alternative build system
In requests like #292 (closed) and !537 (closed) we attempt to optimize the autoconf based build system to reduce the overall CI running time. However our build system accounts for significant time of the build process. Building on 8-core CPU takes 22 seconds, and running autoreconf + configure is 2 minutes. We should consider moving to more modern build systems such as the meson or cmake:
$ time ./bootstrap
...
real 1m31.047s
user 1m26.574s
sys 0m17.299s$ time ./configure --disable-doc
...
real 0m31.453s
user 0m21.157s
sys 0m8.557s$ time make -j
...
real 0m22.807s
user 2m23.928s
sys 0m12.405s