[Fedora-packaging] Re: smp_flags considered dangerous?

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 07:47:26 Axel Thimm wrote:
> But you understand that the month of trials is about buildon the
> Fedora builders, not on your own server or workstation? It isn't
> really a sensible turnover to edit, submit, wait for being queued in,
> wait for being built on all archs, get the response on failure, dig
> trhough a web interface, find the logs, donwload them, comaper them to
> local logs etc. Now add the fact to it that if someone else than the
> submitter has some suggestion it needs first to get piped through the
> submitter, who needs to <repeat all steps above>.

Scratch builds are your friend.  You can target a single arch, build any srpm 
you want, etc...  No need for the hyperbole of above.

> It's different if the problem is actually reproducable on your own
> system.
>
> What's the drawback of a general discommendation of smp_flags (not
> talking about openoffice and friends)? A submitter waiting twice as
> long in build time? Is that really a big drawback in comparison to
> having packages break out of the blue? No Makefile project not
> intended/tested by upstream for parallel builds is smp_flags safe, the
> race may just not have been triggered yet (as in the case of vtk).
>
> And if your build succeeds on F7 and start to mysteriously fail on F8
> will the first thought be that the hidden make -jX bug hit you or that
> something in the build environment is screwed?

To use somebody else's argument it can be useful to /find/ these bugs.  If the 
software doesn't compile right due to smp often it is an upstream bug that 
needs to be addressed.  Maybe the upstream doesn't have access to smp, and we 
can get them into Fedora and give them access to our build farm so that they 
can make better code.

And yes, things are faster.  The faster they get through the build system, the 
faster the next job can start, and so on and so forth.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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