On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:22:29PM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > But grouping independent builds in a single port because it seems logical > is a mistake! This also goes for documentation and such: if the documentation > is provided as an independent distfile, if you build a separate package for > the documentation, and if building the documentation only requires installed > tools (not the work directory of the corresponding software), then it should > be a completely separate port.
Just as a secondary observation, I've started a 4 core build with dpb, with build-order directed by previous builds. I'm just up to gcc/4.2, which means I haven't started libreoffice yet, and I see some of the big dependencies building, like qt4. Stuff like chromium and firefox hasn't started yet. BUT the mozilla-dicts are already built. Why ? simply because they have: - little dependencies - and account for some hefty build time when put together (88 independent packages). but they don't actually contribute anything to the rest of the build, in particular, they're not a dependency to anything else, so they don't unlock any crucial part of the build. But because they're lumped together, they build very early, as their importance is "skewed". That's one slight problem with multi-packages, it counts as one single build. When that's truely one single build, that's cool. When it's actually several builds artificially lumped together, not so good...
