Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed.
This section is not strictly required when LFS does not use systemd. On the other hand, Ninja, along with Meson, makes a powerful build system combination, which will probably be used more and more often. It is required for several packages in the BLFS book.
When run, ninja normally utilizes the greatest possible number of processes in parallel. By default this is the number of cores on the system, plus two. This may overheat the CPU, or make the system run out of memory. When ninja is invoked from the command line, passing the -jN parameter will limit the number of parallel processes. Some packages embed the execution of ninja, and do not pass the -j parameter on to it.
Using the optional procedure below allows a user to limit the number of parallel processes via an environment variable, NINJAJOBS. For example, setting:
export NINJAJOBS=4
will limit ninja to four parallel processes.
If desired, make ninja recognize the environment variable NINJAJOBS by running the stream editor:
sed -i '/int Guess/a \ int j = 0;\ char* jobs = getenv( "NINJAJOBS" );\ if ( jobs != NULL ) j = atoi( jobs );\ if ( j > 0 ) return j;\ ' src/ninja.cc
Build Ninja with:
python3 configure.py --bootstrap
The meaning of the build option:
--bootstrap
This parameter forces Ninja to rebuild itself for the current system.
To test the results, issue:
./ninja ninja_test ./ninja_test --gtest_filter=-SubprocessTest.SetWithLots
Install the package:
install -vm755 ninja /usr/bin/ install -vDm644 misc/bash-completion /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ninja install -vDm644 misc/zsh-completion /usr/share/zsh/site-functions/_ninja