building binutils on cygwin(win-98)

[Nicholas Wourms]

vadraj kulkarni wrote:
> Hello friends,
> I am facing a problem during configuring binutils program on cygwin(win-98).
> 
> I wanted some info regarding compilation of insight on cygwin on windows-98 platform. 
> I am trying to compile binutils-2.13(infact for that matter other versions too) on windows-98. I am not at all able to comple the ../configure. It gives an assertion error after displaying below message.
> 
> "Checking for working autoheader..."
> 
> If i ignore above message, it hangs after below message.
> 
> "Finding the maximum length of commandline..."

This is a known issue with older libtools & Win9x/ME (*not* 
WinNT/2k/XP).  The problem is that the max cmdline length on those 
systems is something like 320000+, so what happens is that since those 
os' aren't preempt, the loop which calculates this length will exhaust 
all available system resources and the cygwin heap before it can reach 
the limit (give it 45min and it probably will return).  I think this 
started happening around cygwin dll v1.3.13, but it was so long ago I 
can't be sure.  The real solution is for someone to ditch this ancient 
libtool and upgrade to 1.5, which handles this and shared library 
support *much* better then the current version.  I've spent awhile 
trying to do this, but I keep on getting hung up on trying to untangling 
the configury mess of the tree (this is no joke).  I don't want to get 
off on a rant here but, needless to say, this is really a job for the 
autotool experts; such as the authors of the Autobook, some of whom I 
know are subscribers to this list (hint, hint...).  In reality, it 
probably isn't going to be solved anytime soon, at least not until 
someone who is proficient in the autotools steps up to do it.  So a 
temporary klugde is to pass "lt_cv_sys_max_cmd_len=8192 ../src/configure 
...", which will cache the value, thus bypassing the troublesome test.

Cheers,
Nicholas

P.S. - I know some of my comments are incendiary, so feel free to flame 
away...