> Considering that Apple will likely be announcing dual quad core > systems in the near future, I wonder if fink should adopt some policy > on packaging that utilizes the extra cores. Specifically if we should > have two changes. One would be a setting in fink.conf which would > either allow fink to use all available cores or limit it to a single > core. The second would be to have those packages which can be properly > build with 'make -j numprocs' to do so (with numprocs being set by > fink to either the number of cores on the system or to one depending > upon the fink.conf setting). Fink could also have an option to > override the setting in fink.conf for a particular build (ie change > the advertised number of cores for fink to use).
Jack, A few years back, Martin pointed out that the place to enable fink builds to finkup MAKEFLAGS from the environment is: in /sw/lib/perl5/Fink/PkgVersion.pm: (around line 4741) # uncomment this to be able to use distcc -- not officially supported! $defaults{'MAKEFLAGS'} = $ENV{'MAKEFLAGS'} if (exists $ENV{'MAKEFLAGS'}); # I support it. This is also on the Wiki, where they also declare 'unsupported-ness': http://wiki.finkproject.org/index.php/Setting_MAKEFLAGS_in_Fink (distcc need not be involved with parallel makes.) Having an old, slow 2P computer, this is the first thing I sudo-edit everytime fink upgrades itself, it picks up my environment's MAKEFLAGS. I've been building -j2 on my home machine (and -j4 on machines at work) ever since. Every once in a while, a package will die on some dependency race, but the failures are far and few. I've seen some InstallScripts that explicitly add a make -j1 to prevent mkdir-races (and as installing doesn't benefit as much from -jN). It might also be feasible for troublesome packages to NoSetMakeflags or coerce -j1. I've also been using ccache-default, (with larger than usual cache size in /sw/var/ccache) at the same time, so in the event of a failure, the rebuild is much faster. (And often, races tun out 'better' on the 2nd, 3rd try...) Builds that cannot use ccache just BuildConflicts with it. I agree that it would be nice for users benefit from multi-procs by default. I'm not sure if injecting MAKEFLAGS into the users environment (/init.[c]sh) would be a good policy. Even if this doesn't happen, it's not the end of the world, it's documented for the ones who search for the solution. End $.02. David Fang Computer Systems Laboratory Electrical & Computer Engineering Cornell University http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/ -- (2400 baud? Netscape 3.0?? lynx??? No problem!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel