Re: Right place for possible bug in mingw32-make

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:07:02 +0200
> From: Jeroen Cranendonk <address@hidden>
> 
> empty test.txt in folder.
> Makefile in same folder with:
> all:
>      "cat.exe" test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt >> 
> (27440 bytes in this example, for just the arguments).
> cat.exe in the same folder.
> 
> Btw, the quotes around cat.exe seem to matter.

Yes, the quotes cause the shell to be invoked to handle the command,
instead of invoking cat.exe directly.

> If I now call 'mingw32-make' in the folder, the output ends with:
> 
>   test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt test.txt 
> test.txt test.tx
> t test.txt
> cat.exe: est.txt: No such file or directory
> cat.exe: tet.txt: No such file or directory
> cat.exe: testtxt: No such file or directory
> mingw32-make: *** [all] Error -1
> 
> Notice the mangled names there, dissapearing characters.

Hm, I cannot reproduce this.  Does the number of characters have to be
_exactly_ 27440, or will larger numbers do as well?  I tried to hit
the exact number, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

Anyway, on my system, I get 2 kinds of results:

  . with a port of Unixy shell sh.exe somewhere on PATH, I get the
    full unmangled output.

  . if I remove sh.exe from PATH, and Make uses cmd.exe as the shell,
    I get this self-explanatory error message:

      The input line is too long.
      make: *** [all] Error 255

With cmd.exe, the error message is expected, because cmd.exe is
documented to have a limit of 4K characters in input lines.

My make.exe is built from patched sources, but I tried with the MinGW
build from make-3.81-20090914-mingw32-bin.tar.gz, and I get the same
results as shown above.

What OS are you running this on?  Do you have some sh.exe on PATH, and
if you do, what port of which Unix shell is that?