I had patched bsd.gecko.mk locally to set MOZ_OPTIONS to support parallel building, but with all the recent changes the local patch was removed. Thunderbird takes 5 hours to build in a bulk run. It should take less than a hour. The reason is that it is building at -j1 even though MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER is set to 5. Please fix bsd.gecko.mk or whatever to enable parallel building for this large port. It seems to be limited to Thunderbird. I haven't noticed a similar issue with FireFox or Seamonkey but I haven't been looking too hard either.
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-ports-bugs->gecko Over to maintainer (via the GNATS Auto Assign Tool)
Is anyone looking at this? It really is highly annoying, especially when having to individually rebuild thunderbird outside of a bulk build. This is common because it breaks on DF all the time. Can someone from gecko@ patch this? It should be easy through MOZ_OPTIONS. I had it working before but the infrastructure changed with USE=gecko, plus it needs to be fixed on FreeBSD as well.
It looks like one user found a solution that works on an individual port basis (I was thinking of the same approach) http://ximalas.info/2014/05/06/parallel-build-of-mailthunderbird-in-freebsd/
This is like Bug #184630.
The solution in bug 184630 comment 6 or linked in comment 3 ignores MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER in make.conf/Makefile.local. And it's redundant after backporting the following fix to comm-esr24 branch. https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-release/rev/dd53119788d8 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 184630 ***
right, I didn't mean to imply to take it verbatim. The blog says MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER wasn't set yet, but that was incorrect. I used a variation of the solution in comment 3 using MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER and it worked fine.