Tuning make.conf

[RW]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:30:05 +0100
"Luca Presotto" <Luca.Presotto at cern.ch> wrote:


> Maybe it's possible that when building the kernel it gives some
> problem, but I'm thinking about compiling ports.

You need to understand that make.conf affects FreeBSD make, which is
used for building  the base system, and for the ports infrastructure.
It's use in ports in analogous to the python part of the Gentoo portage
system. The actual port build itself is normally done by gmake (GNU
make), because that's determined by the upstream project. 

Passing -j directly to a port make doesn't make any sense, and breaks
the ports system. What you need to do is pass the -j to the underlying
gmake in the build stage.  I can't remember offhand how to do that,
but you can look in bsd.port.mk to see what variables get used. There is
also talk of regularizing this this approach by changes to the ports
system.

Whether or not an individual port works with -j is mostly a matter for
the upstream project; many builds will break or become flakey, so any
-j settings need to be made per port rather than globally. 

(BTW if you want to speed-up builds you might also try devel/ccache.)