command line length limitations

[Mark Kettenis]

   Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 11:59:55 +0200
   From: Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de>

   Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> writes:

   |> I changed a bit of version information today and on starting mail I
   |> got again the message that the command line is too long.  Looking
   |> around a bit it seems the message comes from bash.  I replaced the
   |> 2.03 version I had instaleed with a 2.04 test release and it works.
   |>=20
   |> It seems we have to require bash 2.04, at least not 2.03.
   |>=20
   |> Anybody seeing anything like this?  This all happens while
   |> constructing sysd-versions.

   I have never seen that myself.  Bash does not have any builtin
   limit on the command line length.  Bash 2.04 is not the right
   solution, because it has a bug in that it refuses to run if there
   are environment variables with a hyphen in their name.  This means
   it is unusable for compiling glibc.

>From a quick look at the code, I believe it's just a warning.  I
managed to cross-compile glibc for the Hurd with bash 2.04.  There was
an annoying problem with generating sysd-sorted though, which I fixed
by tweaking Makeconfig.  The funny thing is that when I configured
glibc for Linux, sysd-sorted was generated correctly.  So I'm not sure
whether this problem is related to bash at all.

Mark

PS By the way, Andreas, a while ago your mails started to be polluted
by =-signs, sometimes followed by two hexadecimal numbers, that I've
only seen before in messages from people using a certain inferior OS.
Any clue what's happening?