[Rd] Speeding up build-from-source

[Martin Morgan]

On 04/26/2013 07:50 AM, Adam Seering wrote:
> Hi,
>      I've been playing around with the R source code a little; mostly just
> trying to familiarize myself.  I have access to some computers on a reservation
> system; so I've been reserving a computer, downloading and compiling R, and
> going from there.
>
>      I'm finding that R takes a long time to build, though.  (Well, ok, maybe 5
> minutes -- I'm impatient :-) )  Most of that time, it's sitting there
> byte-compiling some internal package or another, which uses just one CPU core so
> leaves the system mostly idle.
>
>      I'm just curious if anyone has thought about parallelizing that process?

Hi Adam -- parallel builds are supported by adding the '-j' flag when you invoke 
make

   make -j

The packages are being built in parallel, in as much as this is possible by 
their dependency structure. Also, you can configure without byte compilation, 
see ~/src/R-devel/configure --help to make this part of the build go more 
quickly. And after an initial build subsets of R, e.g., just the 'main' source 
or a single package like 'stats', can be built with (assuming R's source, e.g., 
from svn, is in ~/src/R-devel, and you're building R in ~/bin/R-devel) with

   cd ~/bin/R-devel/src/main
   make -j
   cd ~/bin/R-devel/src/library/stats
   make -j

The definitive source for answers to questions like these is

   > RShowDoc("R-admin")

Martin


>
> Thanks,
> Adam
>
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