[tex-live] compiling with -j (was: compiling TL7)

Thomas Esser te@informatik.uni-hannover.de
Mon, 11 Mar 2002 20:15:55 +0100


> Btw: Why does 
>         make -j$JOBS pdftex 
> fail so miserably for any $JOBS <> 1? It would be nice if make
> would use my 2nd CPU...

I guess that missing dependencies are the cause. Take for example the following rule
	a: b c
If c depends on b, one should add a dependency for it:
	b: c
If you don't do it, a parallel make might try to do the targets b and
c simultaneously which fails if b depends on c. Since all goes well as
long as make is not in parallel mode, such bugs are oftenly not found.

I find it verry impressing that the linux kernel even compiles fine with
  make -j
(in fact this is a tough stress tess for your hardware and OS).

BTW: I don't think that I want to spend time on this parallel make
issue. What about you? :-)

Thomas