Re: make: dynamic scaling of maxJobs ?

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

>Meanwhile, do you really intend that every time you run make you need
>to type in "make -j /home/me/bin/makejobs.sh"? Is that a good user
>interface, composition or not?

Obviously you didn't read the patch.
I don't expect that usage at all.
The above could even be dispensed with, with little impact to the idea.

In my case  MAKE_JOBS_CMD would be set in local.sys.mk
but it could also be set in the environment.

>It seems to me that "how many parallel jobs should I be starting?" is
>a system-level question whose answers should be provided by a system
>service. 

That doesn't really follow, but as I previously indicated if you want to
provide such a service - great.

>I pointed this out once already. You said it wouldn't be
>portable that way, but that's nonsense. 

Really?  How would you implement this "service" such that I can use it on
SunOS, Linux, AIX ... ?  and in what way would it be superior to a
trivial shell script?
Then again, if it floats your boat go for it.

>Also, I think making it work only for the special case of toplevel
>whole-project makes is not worthwhile. The job tokens infrastructure
>should be improved so it works for real builds too; builds of src, for
>example, or of some of the larger pkgsrc packages. It's great if it
>works for your special case, but it's not much use to anyone else that
>way.

Not sure what you base any of that on.
In all such cases there is a 0th instance of make - which is the master
of the jobs token pool.  If there is any adjustment to be made it should
be made by a single entity only, the master process is the obvious
choice.  The need for ongoing adjustment really only applies to a build
that will run a considerable period.

If you really want to you could make the master signal itself to trigger
adjustment but I wouldn't bother.

>There's pigz, although it apparently uses -p instead of -j, and

Doesn't appear to be on my netbsd box.

>there's been talk of adding -j to sort. And there are other programs
>(both in and out of base) that would benefit from being parallelized
>if the infrastructure to make it transparent existed.

No one is stopping you from providing something.
I won't hold my breath though....