Re: [gentoo-dev] emake question

[Aron Griffis]

Hi Mikael and Daniel,

Mikael Hallendal wrote:	[Fri Aug 17 2001, 04:51:05PM EDT]
> And that is the purpose of it. When creating the ebuild the user can
> write the much shorter and cleaner syntax 'emake' instead of 'make
> ${MAKEOPTS}'. Where MAKEOPTS being defined in /etc/make.{globals,conf}.

Daniel Robbins wrote:	[Fri Aug 17 2001, 05:11:55PM EDT]
> Yes, this is all emake does.  The reason why we don't leave it up to the
> ebuild authors is that -j2 is optimal for uniprocessors, -j3 for dual
> processors, and -j5 for quad processors.  So the -j part needs to be
> definable by the user.  It's easier to type:
>
> 	emake
>
> than
> 	make $MAKEOPTS MAKE="make $MAKEOPTS"
>
> Also, it's less prone to have syntax errors, and easier to remember.

Okay, what is being accomplished here finally makes sense to me!  Thanks
for being patient enough to get it through my skull.  However there are
a couple things I would like to suggest.

(1) The line in emake is

        exec env make ${MAKEOPTS} MAKE="make ${MAKEOPTS}" "$@"

    however it could be

        exec make ${MAKEOPTS} "$@"

    and this has the same result, since it relies on make to pass the
    flags to the sub-makes using the builtin MAKEFLAGS.  I think it's
    actually better, since it allows GNU make to manage it's own
    subprocesses instead of forcing flags on the sub-makes.

(2) However emake is currently inflexible.  For example, say that we
    wanted to provide more potential options to an ebuild's make?  We'd
    add them to MAKEOPTS.  Great!  Except that packages that can't build
    in parallel would also miss out on the extra flags.

(3) Considering the above, a solution would be to provide a couple of
    variables to the ebuild developers.  For example,

        MAKEJOPT = ideal -j option for the current machine (preferably
                   determined at run-time, not install-time)

        MAKEOPTS = other make flags (currently empty)

    Emake can become

        exec make $MAKEJOPT $MAKEOPTS "$@"

    If parallel building doesn't work, the ebuild author could still do
    the following if they want the non-parallel flags.

        make $MAKEOPTS

Does this make sense?  Would it be worthwhile or not?

Aron