Bug#209008: New proposed wording for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS
Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com> writes:
> The majority of packages already supports parallel builds by simply
> passing the appropiate -j flag to make. Not that I object to a
> "parallel" parameter since it can bring some benefits in very specific
> situations, but please make sure this doesn't hinder what is already
> working. In particular:
>
> - It'd be good if it required that packages do not disable parallel flags in
> make in case they're already present (dpkg-buildpackage -jN), even if the
> parallel=N parameter is not present at all.
dpkg-buildpackage -jN adds the parallel=N parameter, so I don't understand
what you're getting at here or why this provision would be useful.
> - I think it'd make sense to add a "should" requirement that packages
> allow any amount of parallelisation. This requirement wouldn't really
> be excessive, I think. It's just a matter of writing Makefiles
> properly by defining the right targets and dependencies; something
> that's easily archieveable when people remove bad habits like assuming
> make processes dependencies in a particular order, etc.
I think I'm opposed. The majority of packages don't take long enough to
build to make supporting parallel building that compelling and many (I
would guess most) upstreams never test their packages with parallel builds
and have a wide variety of subtle bugs. I think this requirement would
put way too much of a burden on Debian maintainers, not to mention making
a huge number of packages insta-buggy (as revealed by recent analysis
posted to debian-devel).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: