[distcc] feature request: command-line switch to avoid using localhost

[Martin Pool]

On  5 Apr 2003, Alexandre Oliva <oliva at lsd.ic.unicamp.br> wrote:
> On Apr  5, 2003, Martin Pool <mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:
> 
> > Do we need to build stage1 remotely, or would it be enough to run the
> > preprocessor and compiler stages separately for local compilations?
> 
> It doesn't matter how stage1 is built, it's not compared with
> anything.  It's stage2 and stage3 that must be compiled under very
> similar conditions, because they're compared, so that's where we must
> not use localhost (because GCC won't generate the same debugging info
> when compile a preprocessed file as it would compiling the original
> file with the integrated preprocessor, and the preprocessor
> maintainers don't want to agree this is a bug :-(

To work with the gcc makefiles does it need to be a command line
option rather than an environment variable?

Is it much slower to just run everything through 127.0.0.1, rather
than introducing a special behaviour?  I guess I should measure this.
 
> > Perhaps a DISTCC_SPLIT_LOCAL option would help?
> 
> I can't imagine what this option would do from its name.  Is it the
> same as the command-line flag I've been asking for?  If so, I suppose
> it would do just as well.

What I meant was that it would invoke the preprocessor and compiler
separately for builds on localhost, so the commands executed ought to
be the same as is used remotely.

> I tried :-(
> 
> The preprocessor maintainers seem to be too focused on performance of
> the integrated preprocessor to want to promote programs such as ccache
> and distcc, that are built on the assumption that separate
> preprocessing shouldn't alter the result of the compilation :-(

This is really unfortunate. :-(  It's not just that distcc and ccache are
useful programs, but it also seems like the right thing to do.

-- 
Martin