[distcc] distcc 2.9 released

[Martin Pool]

2.9 is out.  Use of mmapped files and compression seems to make it
measurably faster in at least some situations, so I encourage you to
try upgrading.

Thanks to everyone who sent bug reports, patches or success reports.




distcc-2.9   "Grace under pressure"  2003-07-21

  FEATURES:

    * Optional LZO1X compression of network traffic, to make distcc
      faster on slow or overloaded networks.  This is turned on by
      appending ",lzo" to each host specification.

      Both client and server must be updated for this to work.  Old
      clients and servers are supported when compression is off, which
      is the default.

      Compression is probably only worthwhile on networks slower than
      100Mbps, but it will depend on the usual factors of CPU, network
      and code complexity.  Thanks to Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer for the
      LZO library.


  BUG FIXES:

    * Handle invocations like "distcc foo.o -o foo", which can be
      generated by Mozilla.

    * Handle invocations like "distcc -Wa,-al=foo.lst -c foo.c", which
      write an assembler listing to a file and cannot be run remotely.

    * When trimming the path to avoid recursive invocations, stop as
      soon as we find one non-symlink compiler.  This should help
      avoid the path getting trimmed down far too much on the server.
      Patch from Wayne Davison.


  PERFORMANCE:

    * The daemon by default allows 2+NCPUS, rather than 3*NCPUS.  The
      two extras are to allow for some processes to be blocked on
      network IO, but allowing more than two of them is probably not
      useful on multiprocessor machines.

    * Larger files are sent and received using memory mappings where
      possible.

    * Use of mmap and compression makes distcc substantially faster in
      at least some cases.


  DOCUMENTATION:

    * Convert the documentation to a series of regular Unix manpages
      for easier reference and so they can be used more easily on
      diverse platforms.  The Linuxdoc-SGML manual has been removed
      from the distribution.  Thanks to Tim Potter for review
      suggestions.


  TESTING:

    * Add tests for new -o and -Wa,-al handling.


-- 
Martin