[Slackbuilds-users] JOBS variable support, and Slamd64 patches handling

[Alan Hicks]

Patrick J. Volkerding wrote:
> Carlos Corbacho wrote:
>> On Sunday 23 March 2008 11:34:57 Aleksandar Samardzic wrote:
>>> 1. As for JOBS variable support, the idea is to have variable defined
>>> at the start of SlackBuild as follows:
>>>   JOBS=${JOBS:1}
>>> and then to change "make" invocation to:
>>>   make -j ${JOBS}
>>> with the intention to allow to users having multi-core machines to
>>> speed-up compilation times significally. This is actually something
>>> that I intended to suggest to adding to SlackBuild script template
>>> long time ago, so - any opinions?

I can see this being a worthy addition.

>> Obviously, I'm in favour of this :). (In cases where this breaks 
>> things, I'd like to see the maintainers put a note in the SlackBuild 
>> that this is the case so that they don't get plagued by helpful souls 
>> trying to keep adding multiple job support to a given SlackBuild, but 
>> that should only be for a minority of cases).
> 
> If $JOBS support is added, I think 3 is a more reasonable default than 
> 1.  It's probably going to be slightly faster even on a single core box.

I've nothing blocking the addition of JOBS support, and agree 3 is probably 
a more reasonable alternative.  It's been awhile since I read this, but some 
where some time ago the kernel devs advocated -j 4 on single processor 
machines as this let gcc continue to build some things while others were 
waiting on disk I/O.  Still, there might be some code out there that 
completely bombs with a forked make, and for many things (python scripts and 
the like) it's entirely unnecessary.

I think this is something that should certainly be discussed on the -devel 
mailing list with the possibility of including it into our template file and 
faq.

-- 
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5

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