fermi's makepkg.conf already has BUILDENV=(distcc ...) which prepends
/usr/lib/distcc/bin to PATH at build time. But Mozilla's mach
configure picks CC/CXX from the environment directly — it doesn't
treat the distcc shim in PATH as the default C compiler unless the
env vars are set explicitly. Without this guard the distcc workers
sat idle while mach drove a local-only build.
Mirrors the explicit-distcc pattern already used in
ffmpeg-v4l2-request-fourier/PKGBUILD.
Caveat documented in the comment: only the C/C++ portion
distributes. rustc and host-only build steps stay local. Empirical
~30-40% wall-clock improvement on a 4-worker pool (tesla, dcc1, dcc2,
ampere via Avahi zeroconf).
pkgrel bumped so a rebuild publishes a new package even though the
binary output for users is unchanged (build process speedup only).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-noether