parallel build for package? (equivalent of make -j8)

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Uwe Ligges wrote:

Peter Dalgaard wrote:

Whit Armstrong wrote:

I have a package that takes about 20 minutes to compile which tends to
prolong the compile/test/compile cycle.

Does anyone know how to get R CMD check or R CMD INSTALL to use
parallel make?

I looked at R CMD INSTALL --help, but I don't see anything obvious
arguments to do this.

Platform?

Does

MAKE="make -j8" R CMD INSTALL ...

not work?

I cannot believe this works safely, at least when installing into the
same library, because of R's lock mechanism that locks a library if *one*
installation is running ...

It does say 'package' (singular).

Good point, I thought we were talking about parallelizing many packages'
installations. One should read the original question more carefully rather
than starting from a response.....
My apologies for the nonsense - and you all know fortune("talking nonsense")
anyway:

Uwe Ligges: I just told nonsense, stepclass() does not make sense with
randomForest(), obviously ... (wonder why nobody shouted?).
Douglas Bates: Oh, we're just so used to you talking nonsense that we don't
bother to point it out any more :-)
  -- Uwe Ligges and Douglas Bates
     R-help (July 2005)


Best,
Uwe

It you know what you are doing you

can switch off the locking (and you also need to worry about installing
dependencies in the right order, at least for source installs).

I don't see the issue though: if you run R CMD INSTALL on a package
directory (rather than a tarball), 'make' will only re-make the compiled
code whose sources have changed.  Or is 'compile' being used loosely for
'install' (and even so it is rare for the bits that are always done, e.g.
dumping R code, to take long).

Best,
Uwe

(Beware: Here there be Tygers. Parallel makes have their surprises....)