portinstall breaks with -m "-j 4"

[RW]

On Saturday 22 July 2006 22:13, Mark Linimon wrote:
> > BTW, I apologize for this is not at all a portupgrade issue, but an issue
> > of the ports system.
>
> It is an issue with individual ports -- actually not the "port" (e.g.
> Makefile framework, pkg-*) but the individual applications (IIUC).
>
> > Well, at least the ports system itself should not be broken able to work
> > with this. With larger ports I manage to reduce build times by 40% with
> > distcc and a second machine. As far as I see it the number of ports
> > breaking is rather low.
>
> Please feel free to suggest a framework (complete with regression test
> framework) where the infrastructure code can "learn" which ports are safe.
> I think it's going to be a harder problem than you think it is.  Note that
> "appears to work" and "can be shown to work under arbitrary build
> circumstances for all users" are IMHO going to be two very different
> classes of problem -- and the latter will need to be solved before it
> can be used on the package-building cluster.

It seem to me that virutally all the advantage could be obtained by passing -j 
just to the build stage, where portupgrade spend most of its time. In any 
case install is probably too IO-bound to benefit.

The user could set say WITH_PARALLEL=4. The value could be passed down to the 
build if the port sets USE_PARALLEL=yes or the user sets 
WITH_PARALLEL_FORCE=yes.