[bug #22923] option to prevent "interspersed" output in parallel builds

[Brian Kustel]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?22923>

                 Summary: option to prevent "interspersed" output in parallel
builds
                 Project: make
            Submitted by: bkustel
            Submitted on: Wednesday 04/16/2008 at 03:26
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Enhancement
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
       Component Version: 3.81
        Operating System: Any
           Fixed Release: None

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Details:

In the Parallel Execution section of the manual, it accurately states: 

   "One unpleasant consequence of running several commands
    simultaneously is that output generated by the commands 
    appears whenever each command sends it, so messages 
    from different commands may be interspersed."

But it should be possible have the output of each parallel command/process
batch up its output and only write it to the primary stdout & stderr streams
when the process completes in a synchronized fashion. This seems like it
should be relatively simple to accomplish. The only downside I can see is that
for LONG processes with lots of output, the display would not be in real time
and there could potentially be some storage issues with holding onto that data
until the process completes. But I imagine one could spool the stdout and
stderr off to a temp file marking which blocks are stdout and which are stderr
and then this could be replayed back later to reproduce the proper ordering of
the stdout/stderr output. 

I suspect most users of the Parallel execution feature would prefer to have
the output of each individual command be contiguous, though perhaps some would
not. 

Thus, I propose that an option be added to force the output of each parallel
process to be made continguous in the primary stdout & stderr streams. 




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