Is ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS behaviour changed but doc not updated?

catkin_make

asked 2013-04-04 06:55:51 -0600

TommyP
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The behaviour of ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS seems to be changed since it does not work setting it to or example "1". But catkin_make --help says:

 -j [JOBS], --jobs [JOBS]
                        Specifies the number of jobs (commands) to run
                        simultaneously. Defaults to the environment variable
                        ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS and falls back to the number of CPU
                        cores.

And I read that as "export ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS=1" should work.

It took me know half an hour finding out what the problem was. Maybe some better error messages would have been good.

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answered 2013-04-04 07:01:49 -0600

dornhege

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updated 2013-04-04 07:09:59 -0600

The official documentation for that is at ROS Environment Variables. This doc hasn't been changed for a long time.

You'll need to set ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS to e.g. -j 2 -l 2.

The reason why this pops up now is that you probably got a fixed version. Previously there was a buggy implementation following your interpretation that cast ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS to int and thus failed anyone that had set this correctly before. I assume that catkin_make has been fixed but the doc hasn't been updated clearly.

Edit: Just checked the current catkin sources. The doc seems to be updated there. So basically that should be clear with the next release.

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Why is the wiki page the official documentaion and how should I know that? If I would guess I would trust what the actual program says more... I solved my problem by fixing all remaining dependencies so that it worked to compiled in parallel.

TommyP ( 2013-04-04 07:45:01 -0600 )edit

@TommyP I made the catkin_make documentation clearer: https://github.com/ros/catkin/commit/5e89a61372d0d378a9f772d7ee5ff5820c70fd71

William ( 2013-04-04 07:55:31 -0600 )edit

Actually the wiki page documents this environment variable for ROS - not only catkin. rosmake should also use that. The program doc should only have stated that it uses 'whatever is in there' in the first place. This was a small hickup that is fixed.

dornhege ( 2013-04-04 10:41:49 -0600 )edit

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answered 2013-04-04 06:59:22 -0600

Claudio