Rakudo builds are unbearably slow with 2.9.0 (somewhat urgent)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Today several of us have been building Rakudo with the Parrot
2.9.0 release and finding that it is taking an extremely long time --
much longer than previously.

Here's my current table of revisions and build times:

  Rakudo    Parrot         Time needed for rakudo's "make"
  2010.09   49192 2.8.0    03m44s
  f17e400   49387          04m16s
  f17e400   49541          04m24s
  f17e400   49575 2.9.0    greater than 20 mins (*)

(*) I'm still waiting for the build to finish as I compose this message.

The times represent the time reported by "time make" after
performing a "perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot" step.  (Full
procedure below.)

Parrot r49541 was on October 15, so the increase in build time is due
to a change that has occurred in the last three or four days.  I'm
working on bisecting the problem further.

I'd ask for a hard freeze on any Parrot trunk commits or branch 
merges until this problem is resolved; otherwise things will get 
very complex for Rakudo's build system and require some ugly
changes on our part.  :-( 

Pm

Steps used to test:
   $ git clone git at github.com:rakudo/rakudo.git
   $ cd rakudo
   $ # edit build/PARROT_REVISION to desired revision
   $ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
   $ time make