GNU make's -j option

Question

Ever since I learned about -j I\'ve used -j8 blithely. The other day I was compiling an atlas installation and the make failed. Eventually I tracked it down to things being ma

Answer 1

If you have a recursive make, things can break pretty easily. If you're not doing a recursive make, then as long as your dependencies are correct and complete, you shouldn't run into any problems (save for a bug in make). See Recursive Make Considered Harmful for a much more thorough description of the problems with recursive make.