On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
>> I looked it up: the user can set something like MAKEOPTS="-j4" in his
>> /etc/make.conf to enable parallel builds, which is then used by default
>> for all packages.  Only some some individual packages ("ebuilds"), like
>> mozilla, disable this (when they are known to break otherwise).
>            \-> by explicitly invoking "make -j1"
>
> 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).
>
> Just brain-storming here.

Please don't call this "thread"safe, that's something different.
If anything, it's SMP-safe.

Else, I guess that's pretty much what I suggested.


  - Hubert