Hello Xan, thanks for the report. This is an Automake issue more than an Autoconf one.
* Xan Lopez wrote on Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 09:29:29PM CEST: > we are using a non-recursive automake setup at the WebKitGTK+ project > (http://www.webkitgtk.org). Today, when adding two new files to the > sources list, I started getting this error when doing a 'make > distcheck': > > niraikanai:~/git/WebKit/build/normal%make distcheck > { test ! -d "webkit-1.1.12" || { find "webkit-1.1.12" -type d ! -perm > -200 -exec chmod u+w {} ';' && rm -fr "webkit-1.1.12"; }; } > test -d "webkit-1.1.12" || mkdir "webkit-1.1.12" > make: execvp: /bin/sh: Argument list too long > make: *** [distdir] Error 127 > > The problem is somewhere in the 'distdir' rule, as the output > suggests, where we are passing the whole source files list of WebKit > to a command, which overflows the reserved space in Linux for such > issues. On Linux before 2.6.23(?), the default limit for command line plus environment when executing a process is something like 128KB, but this can be modified in the kernel (or /proc, I don't remember). On newer Linux kernels, this limit has been lifted to not exist any more. So one workaround would be to build your distribution tarball under a recent kernel only. > I'd be happy to hear of any workaround we could apply in our setup to > avoid this, but I suspect this needs fixing in the distdir.am file. The Automake manual has a section on avoiding long lists for this reason, <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Length-Limitations.html> but in your case that would mean using recursive makefiles (at least without changes to distdir.am it would). I'd still need to think about how practical an distdir.am adjustment would be. At least it would lead to some code duplication. > I've tried to look at it, but couldn't really figure out where it's > failing exactly (my lack of shell skills is not helping here...). This failure is generaated by the kernel, it fails to start the shell command that is that part of the rule. You can debug such make rules with make SHELL=/bin/sh\ -x > There's an odd thing, in that we iterate over the DISTFILES (of the > form 'file1 file2 file3...') with for file in list-of-files; do... > construct; That's likely the culprit. > AFAIK that will iterate through the lines in the input, No; it does something like long_list="$(MAKE_VARIABLES_CONTAINING_LONG_LIST)"; for file in $$long_list; do ... done for file in $$long_list; do ... done for two reasons: - this way, the command passed from make contains the long list string only once, in the variable assignment; this helps keep below the limit if possible. - if the list happens to be empty, it avoids a shell syntax error that would happen with for file in $(LONG_LIST); ... Hope that helps. Man, your package *is* big. I started the 'svn co' before writing this email, and it's still not done. Speaks for svn slowness, too, but your git repo seems unavailable ATM. Cheers, Ralf
