Installing ports in parallel

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Tue Sep 11 10:50:33 PDT 2012


On Sep 11, 2012, at 11:57, Peng Yu <pengyu.ut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't find a way to let port install multiple independent ports in
> parallel to maximally use the cores on a machine. Is there a way to do
> so? Thanks!

This used to be allowed (unintentionally, I think) and would sometimes work, as long as the ports you were installing were truly independent of one another (including their complete dependency chains). But as soon as you started trying to do simultaneous port installs where parts of the dependency chains overlapped, and some of those overlapping dependencies were outdated or not installed yet, things did not work. Confusing error messages were printed that users often did not understand.

We "fixed" the problem a few versions of MacPorts by introducing a lock mechanism that ensures that you can only install one port at a time. I miss the parallel install capability we used to have, but appreciate that this reduces the number of confusing problems our users could encounter, and thus decreases the number of problem reports we receive, which frees up our time to work on more interesting problems.



More information about the macports-users mailing list