Re: distributed compile is avaliable?

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Noel Yap <address@hidden> writes:

  ny> IIRC, there's a patch for GNU make (pmake?) that enables
  ny> distributed builds.  I'm not sure how up-to-date this is, though,
  ny> and I've never tried it out myself.

Look at the README.customs file for more information on this.

There are also other customizations of GNU make to use other distributed
toolkits; unfortunately I lost the patches for one of them and the
author hasn't found the time to re-submit them.  Others have never been
submitted.

  ny> IMO, and no offense, Ken, distcc isn't great since:
  ny> - it's limited to C and C++.

True.

  ny> - preprocessing is done locally which offsets much of the
  ny>   advantages of distributing the build.

For C++, especially, the preprocessing stage is typically not a very
large percentage of the total compile time, so you still buy a lot of
savings using distcc if your code has lots of C++.

And, the way distcc works is actually an ADVANTAGE of sorts, since it
means that very little of the build environment has to be shared between
the distributed machines.  You don't have to worry about different
versions of header files, etc.


So yes, it's not ideal, but in some situations it can buy you a lot for
much less money than "big iron" with lots of CPUs.

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist