Re: Parallel Make

[Tristan Van Berkom]

Noel Yap wrote:
> I agree that a lone -j shouldn't default to infinity for practical 
> reasons.  OTOH, a default of 1 would make the flag meaningless and a 
> default of 2 seems unclean to me.  IMHO, -j shouldn't have a default at 
> all.  Further, for those that like the infinite behaviour, I think 
> allowing --jobs=infinity would help curb such an appetite a little.

    Hmmm, the same could be said about the unix open system call; why
should i have to open a named pipe in read/write if I dont want to block ?
why not throw non-blocking behavior on as default and add a O_BLOCK flag
instead ?

Ok, so its a bad example; but what I'm getting at is that you cant just
modify the expected behavior of the open() system call because everyone's
code will instantly break, much in the same way as IMO, many build
systems will break when you change the expected behavior of GNU make.

If everyone is bent on changing that behavior, why not add something new
like `-J' which behaves exactly like `-j' but with a different default
behavior ?

My casual too sence ;-)

Cheers,
                                         -Tristan