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The 'nc' network compilation tool, v1.1 (man page)
'nc' is a tool that leverages GNU make (or most other build tools that accept a '-j' option to spawn multiple jobs) and rsh to allow distributing compilation across a network of machines that share a common clock and filesystem. In principle, nc should be able to support building in heterogenous environments (thanks to environment variable and command substitutions), but most uses of it have been in single OS/architecture environments. 'nc' is distributed under the GPL, and is copyright Steven Ellis. In the past it has been used on Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD. It does not come with a configure script or any other such niceties, but it is not hard to configure and install, and it does include some descriptions of how it works in the man page, comments in the nc.c file, and in the sample .ncrc configuration file. Included in the package is a python script to analyze the optional syslog output that nc can generate for usage statistics.
The 'nc' network compilation tool, v1.1b1
Beta release--differs from 1.1 only in the use of the pipe() and dup2() calls--it seems that I may have been abusing pipe(), which causes problems on at least linux 2.6.

Last updated 07/26/2004
Copyright 2004 Steven Ellis
ellis@brouhaha.com