Two User-Experience Problems

Jean-François Caron jfcaron at phas.ubc.ca
Thu Aug 20 12:13:57 PDT 2015


Hi, I have two questions/opinions regarding an annoyance when upgrading ports:

1) I want ports to build in parallel when possible, but I’d like to select a maximum number of cores assigned to the job.  My CPU has 8 cores with hyperthreading, and when upgrading e.g. clang, my OS and apps are seriously laggy.  If could limit the number of cores assigned to the job, I’m guessing this wouldn’t happen.  According to my Googles, my only option is to disable parallel builds entirely.  Would it be feasible to add an extra option like “buildmaxcores” or something?

2) Since my OS is unusable during long builds, I walk away from the computer, but then it goes to sleep the build is paused.  The current advice is to get a non-macports app called Caffeine to do some magic, or write a custom port wrapper to use pmset noidle before and after the port command.  This should be an option in the MacPorts configuration somewhere, one shouldn’t have to resort to 3rd-party apps or scripting to get user-friendiness out of MacPorts.

Jean-François


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