A commit just went into cdh5-trunk that added support for Ninja as an optional alternative to make.
It's a lot faster when you only have a handful of files to build. E.g. if no source files are changed, it returns almost instantly, where make takes 10s of seconds. See: http://gerrit.cloudera.org/#/c/2923/ You can try it by installing ninja-build on Ubuntu and adding the -ninja flag to buildall.sh or make-impala.sh. That should just work. You can also build individual targets in the same way as make, e.g.: ninja -j${IMPALA_BUILD_THREADS} impalad or ninja -j${IMPALA_BUILD_THREADS} <another target> If you don't supply -j, it defaults to the number of cores on your machine. This also works now that we added the frontend as a target to CMake: ninja fe - Tim
