Re: make -j in Debian packages

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi>]

su, 2006-06-25 kello 16:36 +0200, Wouter Verhelst kirjoitti:
> It has come to my attention that the gem package is currently built
> using 'make -j 4', to have four compiler processes running at the same
> time. This is a bit troublesome for the poor m68k buildd, which is now
> suffering under High Load And Constant Swapping (HLACS).

As far as I can see, using make's -j option is only useful if you have
multiple processors. Packages should not make such assumptions of the
build environment.

If package maintainer wants to build it faster on their own machine, I
would imagine that checking for an environment variable (DEB_MAKE_OPTS
or something, perhaps?) and using that would be the way to go. By
default, build with a single processor.

I doubt we need a policy change for this. At some point, we need to stop
legislating and start assuming the package maintainers have common
sense.

-- 
Happiness is going NIH on your own stuff.