This was really shortly mentioned on undeadly, because it probably deserves
a separate announcement and article.
First, I want to really thank robert@ again for the organization, and putting
up with rude OpenBSD french developers as he has... plus the people who donated
enough to make these kind of events possible.
Also, my laptop died 3 weeks before the hackathon, and I got a new one,
thanks to project money. It's not really the most expensive laptop you've
ever seen, but it has a dual-core...
Now for some background. I've been maintaining OpenBSD's make for a long time
(over 8 years, I think). It started as simple bug-fixes, then speed-ups, then
more radical clean-ups.
About one year ago, I had a kind of epiphany (yeah, I'm a fan of Angel): I
realized that this code is really atrocious, and instead of fixing bugs,
I started replacing big chunks of it. Not to disparage the guy who wrote
pmake in the first place, as he had very different constraints and goals,
but it is painfully obvious this is a half-finished research project, and
not an industry-standard POSIX make.
So, I started cutting stuff that no-one uses, and options that simply don't
work, to try to make sense of the beast. And I changed algorithms. Most
specifically, I streamlined the suffix handling, and I killed all the
remote job handling.
To make sense of make, you've got to realize there are basically two beasts
folded into one: make in `compat' mode uses its own engine to figure out
which targets to compute first, and its own job runner. The engine is
rather simple, since it doesn't have to queue things up, and can just
run commands. The parallel engine is a bit more complex, since it tries
to explore more of the tree to start up several jobs at once. It also has
an interesting idea: it tries to create shell scripts that agregate commands
to minimize the number of processes created. Unfortunately, THIS is a bad
idea, in modern times, since POSIX mandates separate commands must be run
by separate ...
