Is ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS behaviour changed but doc not updated?

catkin_make

asked 2013-04-04 06:55:51 -0500

TommyP
1339 ●44 ●56 ●72

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.

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

1

answered 2013-04-04 07:01:49 -0500

dornhege

31395 ●134 ●284 ●498

updated 2013-04-04 07:09:59 -0500

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.

edit flag offensive delete link

Comments

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 -0500 )edit

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

William ( 2013-04-04 07:55:31 -0500 )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 -0500 )edit

add a comment

0

answered 2013-04-04 06:59:22 -0500

Claudio