> I asked #gentoo about it.  They told me most packages are thread-safe.
>
> We could mark tested packages with THREAD_SAFE=(yes|no), and have those
> built with -j${THREADS}, where THREADS is user-settable.  THREAD_SAFE would
> default to "no" (for unverified packages), at least in the beginning.  When
> it turns out that this works fine, we could change this default to yes (but
> THREADS would anyway default to 1).

Perhaps someone with a portage tree could find the exceptions to parallel 
building that they've found, and we could use those to seed our pkgsrc 
tree.

I agree that we shouldn't use the term "THREAD", but instead should use 
PARALLEL or JOBS or something which won't confuse people.

The simplest thing would be to add the -j option and let people define the 
number of jobs in /etc/mk.conf, then add overrides to specific packages as 
we find them. Yes? No?

John