Re: default number of JOBS

[John Breitenbach]

David Boyce wrote:
> Just to continue a little farther - I'm sure there are many legitimate
> special circumstances. You, for instance, may have a dedicated server
> on which you've determined the magic number to be 6. You may know that
> you own all the cycles on this machine and that your application or
> build can only run there. So there's nothing wrong with wanting to
> hard wire defaults in such circumstances, but these would be
> exceptional cases and unlikely to be directly supported by GNU make.
>
> BTW, I believe you could export MAKEFLAGS="-j 6" (put it in .profile
> or whatever) and get the effect you want.
>
> It's interesting that GNU make doesn't support a .makerc file in the
> traditional way. I'm sure there's a long history of discussion and
> debate on that topic but I'm not familiar with it.
>
> David Boyce
>   
David,
 Thanks for your thoughts on this.  To clarify my situation...

I have a package manager which fires up make for a potentially large 
number of packages.
(it has is own -j flag to specify the number  parallel packages)
And these packages/units/subsystems, have a wide variety of histories.  
And some are known to
not be parallel-safe.  I'm exploring methods for placing that 
"parallel-safeness" in each package.
Adding something it each packages's toplevel Makefile seemed like a 
convenient place - hence
the original question to see if there was a way to do this list.  And 
fortunately I have other option.

John