[distcc] Re: Make GNOME Fast!

[Martin Pool]

On  5 Sep 2002, Jeff Waugh <jdub at perkypants.org> wrote:
> <quote who="Martin Pool">
> 
> > I've written a free program called distcc, which distributes the work of
> > compilation across several machines on a network.  It works well with
> > GARNOME, and (leaving aside downloads) can compile more than twice as fast
> > as plain gcc.
> 
> Rock! So the bugs you found with libtool and such are all fixed?

You actually still need a small workaround of using a shell script
"distc", that does

  exec distcc gcc "$@"

libtool works happily with that, and in truth libtool itself is so
slow that the small overhead of the script won't matter much.

I'll do it properly in the next one or two releases so that libtool
will be able to just call distcc directly.

I sent patches for a couple of small Makefile races, but there may be
some more lurking in there.

Aside from that, yes, it works well.

The other thing that would help it would be to increase the level of
parallelism in GARNOME.  For example, you could compile gtk+ while you
are downloading libgnome.  This would help even for people without
distcc, and for distcc it should be a big boost.  Of course it will
make it a little more complex, but no worse than -j in general.

-- 
Martin