About:
distcc is a parallel build system that distributes compilation of C/C++/ObjC code across machines on a network. It can be set up in just a few minutes and makes builds up to ten times faster. It does not require machines to share a filesystem or have the same libraries or header files, and installation does not need superuser privileges.

Author:
Martin Pool [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.67/10.00 (22 votes)

Homepage:
http://distcc.samba.org/
Mailing list archive:
http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/distcc/

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based)
[Intended Audience]		Developers, End Users/Desktop, System Administrators
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		MacOS X, POSIX, POSIX :: BSD :: FreeBSD, POSIX :: Linux, Unix
[Programming Language]		C, C++, Objective C, Python
[Topic]		Internet, Software Development :: Build Tools, Software Development :: Compilers, Software Development :: Pre-processors, System :: Clustering/Distributed Networks

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	2.18.3	30-Nov-2004	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Articles referencing this project

• Make alternatives
  by Adrian Neagu , in Category Reviews
  Sat, Jul 9th 2005 00:00
  

 Comments

[»] Makefile oversights
by Nigel Horne - May 3rd 2004 19:08:14

The Makefile doesn't support 'make uninstall' or 'make install-strip'

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[»] Re: Makefile oversights
by Martin Pool - Jul 6th 2004 06:12:18


> The Makefile doesn't support 'make

> uninstall' or 'make install-strip'

I think uninstall is better handled through package management. It is hard to do it reliably from a makefile.


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[»] Re: Makefile oversights
by Nigel Horne - Jul 6th 2004 06:15:43

I take it that you agree that 'make install-strip' is needed since you didn't say anything about it.

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[»] force to do remotely
by igor2 - Jan 11th 2003 00:44:06

First of all, I really like distcc, it does distributed compiling better
than I ever expected from any distributed compiling stuff.

However, when I tried to use it for other purposes, I found out that
it done everything locally, since it wasn't sure that could be done
remotely. If there would be an option that would force distcc to do
a task remotely, that would not bother the original way of use, but
would make people able to do other things than compiling. Like running
cpu-intensive distributed mathematic calculations.

--
bye Igor2

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[»] Re: force to do remotely
by Martin Pool - Jan 12th 2003 01:30:38

I'm glad you like it. Thanks for saying so.

If I understand correctly, you'd like to use distcc to distribute tasks other than C compilation across the network.

distcc has some domain-specific knowledge about C files that lets it know how to distribute them across the network. For example, it needs to know how to run the preprocessor locally so as to remove dependencies on header files, and it needs to know which gcc options will conflict with remote compilation. (This is different to systems like MOSIX, which don't know anything about the tasks they're running, or dmake, which assumes you'll have a shared filesystem by some other means.)

It would be possible to add similar intelligence for other "batch" tasks that can be easily run remotely, such as perhaps compiling other languages. Perhaps distcc could be the start of a framework for such tools.

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[»] Re: force to do remotely
by igor2 - Jan 12th 2003 02:40:48

...

> It would be possible to add similar
> intelligence for other "batch" tasks
> that can be easily run remotely, such as
> perhaps compiling other languages.
> Perhaps distcc could be the start of a
> framework for such tools.
Maybe an external "knowledge-base", as file(1) has magic(5), would be the best solution.


--
bye Igor2

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[»] Re: force to do remotely
by Martin Pool - Jan 12th 2003 04:14:31


> Maybe an external "knowledge-base", as
> file(1) has magic(5), would be the best
> solution.

If it turned out that there was sufficient interest in other tasks which fit within this general concept then some kind of scriptable system would be good.

The task has to be something where it's completely determined by a small number of input and output files, and by the command line. If this is all that's needed, it may be simpler just to use rsh or ssh. distcc is needed mostly because the input has to be preprocessed and checked before being sent across. If it's a simpler task like for example sort then just running it on some random machine will be sufficient.

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