The primary motivating example is openssl:
Before the change full package build took 1m54s minutes.
After the change full package build takes 59s.
About a 2x speedup.
The difference is visible because openssl builds hundreds of manpages
spawning a perl process per manual in `install` phase. Such a workload
is very easy to parallelize.
Another example would be `autotools`+`libtool` based build system where
install step requires relinking. The more binaries there are to relink
the more gain it will be to do it in parallel.
The change enables parallel installs by default only for buiilds that
already have parallel builds enabled. There is a high chance those build
systems already handle parallelism well but some packages will fail.
Consistently propagated the enableParallelBuilding to:
- cmake (enabled by default, similar to builds)
- ninja (set parallelism explicitly, don't rely on default)
- bmake (enable when requested)
- scons (enable when requested)
- meson (set parallelism explicitly, don't rely on default)
- waf (set parallelism explicitly, don't rely on default)
- qmake-4/5/6 (enable by default, similar to builds)
- xorg (always enable, similar to builds)
Follow the same pattern as used in the cmake setup hook to assume
`enableParallelBuilding=1` when unset by the user. This makes wafHook
honor `NIX_BUILD_CORES`. See #136368 and #136641.
The convention of `--cross-compile` and `--cross-execute` is common
enough that it seems like a reasonable default. However there are
projects like mpv which do not use these flags, and rightfully fails
to configure when passed unexpected flags.