The lay utility installs eggs. It leverages the index file generated by egg-tarballs-index and chicken-install to parallelize and speedup the eggs building process.

lay [-h] [-c] [-v] [-j jobs] [-z zcat] egg ...
    -h         display this help page and quit
    -c         clear the local cache before doing anything else
    -i prog    use 'prog' as chicken-install program
    -v         print verbose output
    -j jobs    use at most 'jobs' parallel processes (default: 4)
    -z prog    use 'prog' as zcat program

The lay utility retrieves the eggs index file from the egg-tarballs directory of the running CHICKEN major release. A copy is kept in a local cache directory to avoid unnecessary downloads. A DAG representing eggs dependencies is generated from the eggs index file. The DAG file is cached too. The DAG is then resolved into levels. Each level contains independent eggs that can be built in parallel. Here comes the major advantage of using lay: multiple instances of chicken-install can be used to build the eggs at each level. As an example, to build version 1.42 of the brev egg we need to resolve 6 levels:

• (srfi-71:0.2 llrb-syntax:0.2 memory-mapped-files:0.4 anaphora:1.0.1 srfi-69:0.4.3 miscmacros:1.0 matchable:1.2 srfi-18:0.1.7 srfi-14:0.2.1 srfi-1:0.5.1)
• (sendfile:2.0 uri-generic:3.3 defstruct:2.0 fast-generic:0.7 brev-separate:1.97 clojurian:3 combinators:1.2.2 srfi-13:0.3.4)
• (sxpath:1.0 srfi-128:0.11 simple-md5:0.1.1 base64:1.0 uri-common:2.0 html-parser:0.3 sxml-transforms:1.4.3 strse:1.39 srfi-42:1.76 quasiwalk:1.10 getopt-long:1.21 sxml-serializer:0.5)
• (tree:1.50 llrb-tree:0.3.8 intarweb:2.1.0 fix-me-now:1.5 match-generics:2.8 sequences:0.6.1 define-options:1.23)
• (scsh-process:1.6.0 http-client:1.2.1 acetone:1.2 dwim-sort:1.4)
• (brev:1.42)

At the time of this writing, on a reasonably cheap VPS, building brev with plain chicken-install vs. using lay results in these times:

• chicken-install brev: 805.06 secs
• lay -j 8 brev: 373.90 secs

Pietro Cerutti

https://code.ptrcrt.ch/lay

 Copyright (c) Pietro Cerutti
 All rights reserved.
 
 Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 are met:
 
 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 
 THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
 ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
 IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
 ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
 FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
 DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
 OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
 HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
 LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
 OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
 SUCH DAMAGE.

• 0.3.1
  • fix the resolution of a DAG with only independent nodes
• 0.3.0
  • fix reading/writing binary streams
  • support C6
• 0.2.3
  • second round of refactoring and unit-tests
• 0.2.2
  • add version property to .egg file
  • first round of refactoring and unit-tests
• 0.2.1
  • keep all versions in the DAG, they might have different dependencies
• 0.2.0
  • fix installing the egg that appears last in the index file
  • take the highest version available in a versioned dependency
  • skip the srfi-4 and chicken eggs
• 0.1.2
  • default chicken-install to C_INSTALL_PREFIX/bin/chicken-install
  • allow overriding the chicken-install program via -i
• 0.1.1
  • default zcat to gzcat on macOS
• 0.1.0
  • initial release