Adjusting jobserver size (was: Re: No follow up on patches to support newer glibc ?)

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2018-04-05 at 00:26 +0200, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Apr 2018 15:42:51 -0400
> Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> > It does look like we need to make a new release soon.
> 
> If so, is there anything I can do to get the functionality of my
> contributed patch in bug #51200 into the upcoming new release?

Thanks for the reminder Henrik.  For those interested, the link is:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?51200

I'll confess I'm on the fence about this.  On the one hand I could
imagine where it would be useful.

On the other hand, it's a complex change (I'm not convinced that your
implementation is complete: for example, it's not immediately clear to
me how the decrement handles the "free token" concept of the job server
implementation... also, it's not a good idea to use fputs() in a signal
handler, and I haven't traced down what other possible issues the other
calls in increase_job_signal_handler() might have); it doesn't have
testing with it to make sure it continues to work, and while useful in
specific situations this feature likely won't be widely needed and so
get less testing.  And it is limited to only working on POSIX systems
as others don't support SIGUSRx (IIRC).  I get that we already use
SIGUSR1 for debug toggling so there is precedent.

When I realize I started make with a jobserver value I don't like, I
typically just kill the make and restart it.