<story><title>GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2015/03/gnu-make-insanity-finding-value-of-j.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>snoopybbt</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how many hours the author has spent&amp;#x2F;wasted on this topic (and how many people are now wasting their time coming up with other solutions that in the end do NOT fix the real problem), but...&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I find this whole &amp;quot;look i did a horrible hack and let&amp;#x27;s see who can make the best worst horrible hack&amp;quot; thing quite stupid and silly.&lt;p&gt;GNU Make is free software released under a free license, my opinion is that instead of doing that crazy thing, the author could have just written a patch for GNU Make in order to make it export a &amp;quot;JOBS&amp;quot; environment variable to all its child processes.&lt;p&gt;Oh but yes, &amp;quot;I felt this feature was missing so I added it&amp;quot; is way way way less cool than &amp;quot;geez the gnu make folks are insane lollerplex they have no way to know how many jobs they&amp;#x27;re running&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;ALSO: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.catb.org&amp;#x2F;esr&amp;#x2F;faqs&amp;#x2F;hacker-howto.html#believe2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here it is a patched version of GNU Make, providing a #J variable that holds the number of jobs as passed via -j&amp;#x2F;--jobs:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;santoro.tk&amp;#x2F;~manu&amp;#x2F;gnumake.png

&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
As can be seen in the screenshot, it can be passed as environment variable to programs called by make&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/esantoro/make&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;esantoro&amp;#x2F;make&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2015/03/gnu-make-insanity-finding-value-of-j.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jwatte</author><text>Those who don&amp;#x27;t learn make are doomed to reimplement it. Poorly.&lt;p&gt;Also: never, ever, build a make system that relies on recursive make invocations.&lt;p&gt;Automake is a particularly egregious violator is this rule (and other sanity rules) and has probably hurt make more than anything else.</text></comment>