Re: findutils on interix

[Markus Duft]

On 10/28/2010 10:55 AM, James Youngman wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Markus Duft <address@hidden> wrote:
>> through trial and error, i found out that with a 3K environment, 50K seems 
>> to work well, which seems rather odd then - as arguments would be 47K in the 
>> worst case then, right?
>>
>> i have no idea how we could be able to reliably find a "real" limit on 
>> interix, other than a configure check which tries to exec until it works... 
>> however, the check would need to grow the env to the maximum, too.
>>
>> as "start values" the check could use the same as the arg_max init stuff 
>> (sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX) or ARG_MAX, whichever is bigger), and then decrease 
>> them until it works.
>>
>> thoughts?
> 
> This means we would have to give up any hope of supporting
> cross-compilation with Interix as the target, or for that case simply
> configure a known-working limit.   If we take the second option, we'll
> have a limit that only applies in the cross-compilation case, which is
> likely to produce an obscure bug further down the road.    I would
> rather not leave any rarely-exercised cases at all.

yeah, right - so either forbid cross compilation, or set hard limits based upon 
my explorations...? i vote for the hard limits. i know it's not good, but there 
is no chance interix get's a hotfix in this regard either, so... and the limit 
is the same for all windows and will prolly not change (at least in the next 
few years).

redefining ARG_MAX in arg-max.h for interix to (64512 - 8192) does the trick. 
for _some_ reason, it does not work to set it to the full 64K or even only 
60K... some system overhead must be hidden somewhere...

(BTW. libtool has a hard coded limit for max command line argument length on 
interix too (which is wrong too: 196608 (lol)), because determination is 
seemingly impossible, and a fix very unlikely).

markus

> 
> James,