Re: htags fails with "Negative exec line limit" if the environment is large

[Shigio YAMAGUCHI]

Hello,
As you pointed out, this is a bug in htags.
Internally, htags performs the same processing as xargs(1),
but it limits the environment with an outdated small value.
I'm going to take GNU findutils as a reference and change
the limit to the correct value.
Thank you for the report!

Regards,
Shigio

On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 11:24 PM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> Hi; I'd like to report a bug in 'htags': it fails with an obscure
> error message if the environment happens to be large. Here's a
> repro case:
>
> $ mkdir htags-bug
> $ cd htags-bug/
> $ cat >hello.c
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main(void) {
>     printf("hello world\n");
>     return 0;
> }
> $ gtags
> $ htags -anT
> $ BIGVAR=$(perl -e 'print "x" x 100000') htags -anT
> htags: Negative exec line limit = -80391
>
> As you can see, htags works normally with a small environment, but
> if there happens to be an environment variable whose value is large
> then it fails.
>
> We ran into this with QEMU, because it happens that the GitLab CI
> system puts the text of the git commit message into an environment
> variable. So our CI job that runs 'htags' fell over if the commit
> being tested had a large commit message...
> (The QEMU bug about this is
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2080 -- we'll work
> around this by clearing that environment variable before running
> htags, but I wanted to report it to you upstream as well.)
>
> I've tested this with "htags (GNU Global) 6.6.11"; the bug
> is also present in earlier versions, such as those distributed
> in Debian and Ubuntu.
>
> thanks
> -- Peter Maydell
>


-- 
Shigio YAMAGUCHI <shigio@gnu.org>
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