Re: Improvement on parallel make

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:21 +0100, Christophe Lyon wrote:

> No reply? No interest in this new feature?
> Given the amount of discussion we had in december 2006, I thought that
> the patch I proposed could help many people.
> Any plan?

Hi Christophe...

Sorry for the delay; I've been shoveling snow etc. and my cable internet
access was down due to the storm :-/.

Anyway; I've right now got my plate full with the stuff I'm doing.  If
there were some kind of consensus on how this should work and an obvious
solution everyone agreed with then that would be one thing.  But, after
all the discussion it is still not clear to me exactly what the right
solution is for this problem: that is, whether a separate .WAIT target
should be used, or .MUTEX, or what.  I'm really not interested in
introducing another complex but not fully thought-out (or at least not
clearly specified) feature; I already have enough problems with stuff
like .SECONDARY etc.

Normally it would be my job to drive the discussion and come up with a
final solution but, as I say, I just don't have the time right now.

I think Philip's point here is quite correct:

> That said, this does appear to be a real problem.  It appears to me,
> however, that .WAIT is *not* the right solution for it, but I see no
> point in spending any brain cycles on it until a decision is made
> about what the problem is.  Is it just to obtain compatibility with
> BSD make (and Sun's dmake)?  Or is to actually solve a problem in
> making build setups work when using GNU make's -j flag?  If the
> former, then .WAIT is a done deal and I'll shut up.  If the latter,
> then some backing up and thinking about how to actually achieve the
> goal is necessary.

http://www.mail-archive.com/help-make%40gnu.org/msg06340.html

We seem to need one or more concrete examples of the various problems we
need so solve, and how the various proposed solutions (or new ones) do
the job.  If the ONLY problem really under consideration is serializing
archive creation, it's even possible that we could handle that as a
special case (after all, archive handling is ALREADY a very special case
in make).

I can and will work on this in the future, but if it's up to me it will
take a while longer.

-- 
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