why no provide multicore build by default? =(

[jkuhnert@…]

​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352419/why-does-macports-take-forever-to-build-simple-packages/1795688#1795688

I can understand maybe being a little leery of doing this by default or trying to build detection logic for it but maybe in the setup guide somewhere it could be mentioned? Like hey, if you happen to be using a computer made after the year 2007 or so you might want to set this property in your macports config. I don't know. I'm sure I'm not saying anything people don't already know. Feel free to close ticket and tell me to fuck myself since I've not provided any help other than complaints. ;)

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

MacPorts automatically detects this for you if you don't set it manually, see the comment in ​http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/base/doc/macports.conf.in#L79.

It's a common myth that setting this manually speeds up your build.

[jkuhnert@…]

I could be using selective memory here but I'm almost certain that value was set to 1 for me. Maybe I changed it in the past but I'm fairly anal retentive and think I'd remember something like that? I've also gone through multiple macports core upgrades so maybe this was a lingering artifact of a previous version.

It's one of those two, if it's the latter and not me wasting your time again perhaps a simple one-liner warning message could be output when doing any build by having it always detect number of cores if value not 0. I'm sure there's some fraction of users that would find a reason to hate this option as well but for people who somehow ended up with the non-l33t default it sure would be nice to know there's a way to make it faster. I only share because I love macports so much, but clearly not enough to help. ;)

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

The default config file did change about 4 years ago. We can't change it or print a warning because some users want it the way it is, to reduce power usage for instance.

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

Replying to jmr@…:

We can't change it or print a warning because some users want it the way it is, to reduce power usage for instance.

We could implement some option tp check and print recommendations after selfupdate, though. Or, we could add a message after selfupdate to remind users they should diff macports.conf and macports.conf.default.