MAKEOPTS and >-j1

[Xake]

I have a network with some slow machines (pentiumII) and some MUCH faster machines (pentium4/AMD Turion 2x) and are using distcc to compile packages on my slower machines.
Today I ran distccmon-gnome on one of the slow ones to see how distcc behaved and saw some big packages (like metacity) not being distributed to other machines.
Looking at the ebuild I found

Code: Select all

MAKEOPTS="${MAKEOPTS} -j1"

and the question raising in my head is:

Is this due to bad Makefiles or is the example above the ONLY workaround?

If it is not: why do we allow us this workaround? Would it not be better to bug upstream to get their Makefiles right or patch it?

I think the above example is the wrong way to go since it gives problems with distcc, SMPs will not have their full potentials used and last but don't least: sometimes this "fix" is kept even when the problem is fixed upstream.

For example metacity: in the bugtracker there is in the bugreport for the issue of having parallel buildings at least one comment from a person who did not have problems compiling metacity-2.6.* (a package from 2003) with parallel processes. On my machine a edited ebuild (2.16.* and 2.17.*) worked with distcc and MAKEOPTS="-j" and that spawned an AWFUL lot of processes threaded over at least three diffrent machines and it compiled fine.

So is it time to place a QA for

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MAKEOPTS="${MAKEOPTS} -j1"

and fix this in the source rather than having a workaround in the ebuilds?

[moocha]

Is this due to bad Makefiles

Yes.

Would it not be better to bug upstream to get their Makefiles right or patch it?

Definitely yes.

sometimes this "fix" is kept even when the problem is fixed upstream.

True.

So is it time to place a QA for

Code: Select all

MAKEOPTS="${MAKEOPTS} -j1"

and fix this in the source rather than having a workaround in the ebuilds?

The right thing to do is to find the bug that caused the workaround to be inserted in the first place and reopen it, or to open a new bug about it if no such bug could be found. Please see Gentoo Bugzilla for details.