Re: Parallel build results
On 01/01/08 at 18:23 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> writes:
>
> > On the other hand, DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=n was ignored by packages
> > that have not been validated by the maintainers, and used by packages
> > that have been tested by the maintainer. Also it was possible to use
> > only on some parts of the build. For example the make install part is
> > sometimes problematic, and mainly depends on I/O throughput of the
> > machine, and not CPU. This make some problems difficult to detect, as
> > they happen only in rare case on some machines.
> >
> > Unfortunately dpkg-buildpackage now looks for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS and call
> > debian/rules with -j and the value it founds in this environment
> > variable. That makes DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=n useless, as it has the
> > same effect as dpkg-buildpackage -j.
> >
> > I personally think that supporting DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=n on some
> > packages is a first goal to achieve. Supporting this option in the 100
> > packages which take the longest to build would probably be a huge
> > improvement in build time of the whole archive, while being easier than
> > fixing all the packages in the archive.
>
> I agree with this analysis. I think the MAKEFLAGS setting in
> dpkg-buildpackage should be removed and instead calling dpkg-buildpackage
> with the -j option should just set the parallel=n flag in
> DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS. From there, we can leave it to package maintainers to
> decide how to implement this.
I filed bug #458589 against dpkg-dev about this. I think that both
following solutions are fine:
- dpkg-buildpackage must not consider DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=n as
the same thing as calling dpkg-buildpackage -j n.
- dpkg-buildpackage -j must not set MAKEFLAGS. But if this is choosen,
dpkg-buildpackage -j will simply become another way of doing 'export
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="parallel=n"'. Is it really worth keeping in this
case?
> If someone *really* wants to try forcing make to do a parallel build, they
> can always set MAKEFLAGS themselves directly.
True ; maybe dpkg-buildpackage -j is completely useless, actually.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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