See pkg/7590, which is a look at providing a lock for just this reason.
I never finished the code though, and no one else has felt it a pressing
matter.

							David

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 12:00:59PM -0500, Amitai Schlair wrote:
> I was helping a friend install and configure NetBSD last night, and we
> ran into an interesting problem while adding some packages. On one
> virtual console, we started devel/cvs building; on another, we started
> mail/fetchmail. When we came back to check progress, we found that both
> builds had stopped. This occurred because both packages required
> lang/perl5, which hadn't been installed already, and both happened to
> try building it at the same time. I don't have the precise error
> messages, but one package terminated the make, and the other was blocked
> in the middle of "make patch" asking for "File to patch:". It was a
> race.
> 
> I would have liked pkgsrc to let the first package to descend into
> lang/perl5 win, and have the other package block (perhaps with an
> informative message) until Perl is installed. So I'm wondering whether
> it's worthwhile to put a simple lock around each package build.
> 
> Are there other unsolved problems in pkgsrc with multiple simultaneous
> builds? Is it desired for pkgsrc to behave well in such situations?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Amitai

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Although some of you out
there might find a microwave oven controlled by a Unix system an attractive
idea, controlling a microwave oven is easily accomplished with the smallest
of microcontrollers. - Russ Hersch - (Microcontroller primer and FAQ)