On Sat, Jun 18, 2005 at 04:21:50AM -0700, John Gilmore wrote: > I've been pleasantly surprised at how well xargs --max-procs N works. > I've been using it with wget, and it lets me trivially parallelize > some kinds of web spidering. As more people get multiprocessor > systems and multiprocessor cores, it will become even more useful. > > The enclosed patch lets the parallelism of a long-running xargs be > turned up or down with SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2. This lets me dynamically > increase or decrease the network bandwidth I consume, without doing a > cumbersome stop, rework the arguments, and restart cycle. > > The cleanliness of the existing code made this an easy improvement to > contribute. I've also improved the documentation of --max-procs with > a few examples.
This is a very interesting change. The patch itself is exemplary in terms of the inclusion of quality documentation, too. Thanks. As your documentation takes pains to point out, there is no simple way to programmatically increase the parallelism to N, or set the degree of parallelism to exactly N. I can't think of a useful way of providing that feature, useful though it would be. I would like to apply your patch. However, since this is a significant change, I need to ask you to assign your copyright interest in the change to the Free Software Foundation. I'm obliged to do this before applying the patch. Would you be willing to do this? If so, I'll put a copy of your patch at http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=findutils to make sure I don't lose track of it while we wait for the copyright assignment process to complete. Two small nits with the patch: 1. It's probably better to reference signal(7) (which most Unix systems have) than signal(2) (which I suspect many don't). 2. There's no need to say "+ blah patch" in the version information - if your patch is applied to findutils, it becomes part of the mainstream findutils release, and users can see the feature exists by reading the documentation or the NEWS file. I realise that putting that information into the version information would be helpful to you locally, of course. Thanks again for your contribution. James. _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
