Can I change gnu make parallelism factor on the fly?

Question

I want to run my make with -j8 if I'm not using distcc, but -j40 if distcc is enabled.

If I don't figure out whether or not I can use distcc until deep in the execution of the makefile, is there a way to change the -j factor at that late date? Or do I have to make the decision in a wrapper script before I invoke make? (I really don't want to run make recursively, with a different -j factor in the sub-make).

Answer 1

There's no way to change the number of jobs on the fly. The jobserver is configured right at the beginning of make, and it's not possible to reconfigure it with a different size without restarting make.