Some time ago, Matthew Dillon worked on a bulk build system that built as much of pkgsrc in parallel as possible. It’s in the tree now as ‘fastbulk‘, for anyone wanting to try it out. I used it a bit; I didn’t measure the degree of speed increase, but was able to get about 70% of the packages built.
2 Replies to “fastbulk now added”
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Right now most powerful tool to build packages (also bulk builds) is probably distbb made by Aleksey Cheusov (can be found in pkgrc-wip). Fixed amount of parallelism (number of processed packages at once) can be set, also some work of cross-building has began.
Question is how fastbulk compares to distbb or even better what kind of gains you can expect from fastbulk? There are two bottle necks for parallel bulk builds – dependencies and configure scripts. On modern machine configure part of building package can and will take more time than compiling in many cases. I think there has been even discussion about caching configure output on one of the pkgsrc mailing lists at one point.
I wouldn’t be surprised if fastbulk (if I understand it tries to build as many packages at once as its can) will be comparable to let’s say 20 build processes at once in distbb.
That’s bullshit. There is essentially nothing that distbb does that isn’t already available with pbulk.