[Queue-developers] using queue to distribute compilations ?

[Philippe W. <phi...@gu...>]

I am now looking at queue (during my free time :) to see if this
could not improve our development environment.

The situation :
We are doing Air Traffic Flow Management for complete Europe and
We have a big application (1400000 lines of Ada code).
We are currently in the process of changin of Ada compiler (in order
to use the gnu Ada compiler instead of a proprietary compiler).

I would like to see how I could use queue to improve the compilation
speed of the system.
I describe hereafter 2 possible options and some questions.
Any feedback would be appreciated.

Option 1:
---------
The gnu ada compiler has an automatic make facility (gnatmake) that supports
parallel compilation. Giving e.g. -j6 argument means : do 6 compilations
in parallel. The compilation command can also be given as an argument to
gnatmake (default = gcc).

To make use of queue, I would give a big number of parallel compilation (e.g. 
20) and specify that the command to use is a shell script that would call :
   queue .... gcc file_to_compile

I do not understand if I have to use the immediate argument of queue (-i)
or if I have to use the -q argument. I have not really understood what is
the difference between the now spooldir, the queue spooldir and I also saw
a wait spooldir.


Option 2:
---------
gnatmake has also an option : instead of starting compilation process, it
can also only give the list of compilation command to do.
This list could then be processed so as to be a serie of queue command.

What kind of commands should it be ?



Then, a question/suggestion :
Sometimes, gcc process size becomes huge (>200Mb) when compiling some files
containing generic instantiation (i.e. C++ "templates" but for Ada).

Is there a way to control queue algorithm so that a job is started on a 
computer only if there is enough swap space available ?


Thanks for any hint helping me to use gnu-queue + gnu-ada compiler together.

--
Philippe WAROQUIERS             Eurocontrol - Central Flow Management Unit
phi...@cf...    Rue de la fusee, 96
Tel: +32 2 729 97 35            Brussels
Fax: +32 2 729 90 22            Belgium