Re: GNU make 4.2 (and 4.2.1) failing due to length of command-line

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Adrian Muresan <address@hidden>
> CC: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 18:48:35 +0000
> 
> I ran using GNU make 3.81 from two different sources:
> 
> once using the binary form sourceforge 
> And 
> once using the binary from QNX. 
> 
> QNX gave no error and SourceForge gave an error (the same error as 4.2, 4.2.1 
> I built and the 4.0+ binary version Eli told me to get from SourceForge). 
> 
> Doesn't this prove there's a bug? As Eli said, QNX obviously patched 
> something since everything else, even the shell used, was the same. 

The bug, or rather, the limitation is not in Make, it's in the shell
you use.  I suggested how to build Make in a way that might work
around this limitation, and I'm guessing that the QNX folks built
their make with that option as well.  Of course, it would be best to
know what changes they made, so that you could make the same changes
in the newer Make.

However, all this does not change the basic fact that the limitation
is in Bash.  Make, on its side, invokes Bash with the full command
line, but Bash only reads the first 16KB of it.  How is it a bug in
Make?  Make doesn't have a goal of catering to limitations of programs
invoked from Make, certainly not the limitations of MSYS Bash, which
is not even a simple native Win32 application.  GNU Make development
cannot be responsible for limitations of other programs out there,
it's unreasonable to expect it to do that.