Re: Make GNOME Fast!

[Martin Pool <mbp samba org>]

On  7 Sep 2002, Nick Moffitt <nick zork net> wrote:
>> [external parallelization]

(or, as my old professor called it, paralysation.)

> 	It's a tough problem, and one that I'd like to see solved
> portably.  Some individual packages, for example, are not internally
> parallelizable, and the system would need to be smart about
> dependencies.  We'd probably need to set up some sort of external
> locking mechanism, and that makes me kind of queasy.

My naive idea was that building several packages in parallel would be
a nice way to avoid worrying about whether they are internally
parallelizable.  So at the GAR level dependencies like this would seem
to be safe and also permit useful parallelization:

  install-libgtk: build-libgtk
  build-libgtk: download-libgtk
  build-libgnome: install-libgtk download-libgnome

I haven't looked at whether this would work inside GARNOME.  I guess
you would want to have some kind of lock file indicating that the
installation has completed, so that you don't need to actually run
"make install" every time.  I suppose also you would want some kind of
limit on the number of download tasks that can run at any time.
 
-- 
Martin