>Most of the ones *I* have installed seem to use multiple cores.
Yes but take a closer look, they aren't compiling with -jx. You're just seeing the use of multiple cores because the scheduler allocates some tasks like disk io etc. to different cores. Firefox, QT, GTK, OO etc. are on the agenda - but tests take a long time.
And guess why? See for example icu:
http://www.freshports.org/devel/icu/
Quote:
Disable the parallelized building. It seems, there are races hidden in
the vendor's makefiles.
Those (like myself), for whom the parallel build just worked, can simply
use the new whitelist functionality of the ports system.
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So it's a work in process and I don't think Gnome is ready for it. But I don't know, it's a rather 'early project'.
[edit]
http://blogs.freebsdish.org/pav/2009...-for-everyone/
Multi processor compilations for everyone