Because parallelism is not enough generalized and people don’t seek it enough (make is a good example), I long thought it would be a good thing to have a way to have parallelism activated more easily (or even by default) in make (or manually by automake or anything of this kind), until now I think it is essentially used by people who read on archlinux/gentoo/lfs manuals that “-j <cpu cores>+1” is the optimum.
Then I discovered --load-average, and I’m asking myself wether the optimum is -j n+1, -l 1.0, or -l n or n+1? For whatever is the actual optimum, wouldn’t be a useful option for portability that make go search the core number in /proc/cpuinfo when available, or anything more lowlevel, simple to parse or portable if possible, and use that as a default if instead of a number the text “auto” is given as an argument to -j or -l? I was also wondering: is this constant number of jobs, with additionally -l 1.0 the actual optimum, or would it be better if it was the minimal number of jobs running while it is below this threshold, or the maximal one, like it is currently? If the former, would it be worth to change the current behavior? I think a such default (and pre-automated) way to call make could maybe incitate people to try using parallelism capabilities of GNU make in automatic build tools so then it’s more used, then more tested, and parallel-compatible makefiles become more common, if they’re not enough already. Sorry for verbosity, I hope a such handencement-request is relevant enough for your time, so thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
