Re: make: dynamic scaling of maxJobs ?

["Simon J. Gerraty" <sjg%juniper.net@localhost>]

David Holland writes:
>On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 05:18:09PM -0700, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:
> > I renamed the operative variables so that they can be set in the
> > environment.
> > This makes it easy to impose this strategy on old branches that know
> > nothing of it, this is likely the most useful approach.
> > Only level 0 make will pay attention - since it would be a bad idea
> for
> > more than one instance of make to attempt to adjust the token pool.
>
>It still seems to me that this is a hack and neither the right
>interface for the long term nor something we want to support in the
>long term.

Using tools to compose solutions is the unix way.
A tool that does one thing - report how many concurrent jobs would be
good right now fits very well.

Allowing another tool - make - to leverage said tool fits well too.

Note that while I have a simple script which does an adequate job of
doing that, I'm *not* defining how such a thing should work out the
answer - I shouldn't care.

>And (again? I forget, I've been kind of distracted lately) what about
>other programs that also support the -j idiom?

I'm spacing; which other tools/apps that support -j are you thinking
of?  and what about them?  If they take a -j arg you can always run them
as -j `maxJobs.sh`.  If they run long enough to matter you might want to
enhance them....

If you have an alternative that is equally effective and portable I'd be
interested.