can make -j be used for ports?

[Eitan Adler]

>Is this possible or am I being unreasonable, or both, or not?

This is unsupported, but you are not being unreasonable. This is a
much wanted feature.

> Yes.  Ports which support parallel builds will have MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=yes set in the port Makefile.  It defaults to running -j with MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER=`${SYSCTL} -n kern.smp.cpus`, but you can change that to some other # if you like.

No, this is incorrect. The MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER and MAKE_JOBS_SAFE is used
internally when building a single port. When the OP is asking if he
can manually specify -j on the command line which would end up
building multiple ports in parallel. This can not be done (primarily
because there is no locking done on ports)

Certain utilities can make this process faster. For example portmaster
prefetches as much as it can,


-- 
Eitan Adler