Re: autoconf: undocumented limitation

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Bruno,

* Bruno Haible wrote on Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 02:58:13AM CEST:
> 
> Files that are used as arguments of AC_CONFIG_FILES must have a maximum line
> length (not counting the newline) of at most 3070. This limitation is not
> documented in the autoconf manual. Could you please document it?

Are you complaining that the limitation of 'awk' is not documented, or
that the limitation of 'config.status' is not documented?  If the
latter, then no, I don't think we should document that.  We should just
document that config.status works only on text files, i.e., the line
length is limited to LINE_MAX, and document the 'awk' limitation in the
Shell Portability section.

Actually, we should fix config.status if somebody sees a portable way.
sed only gets us to 4000 bytes which I don't think is worth the hassles
of pre- and postprocessing the stuff we feed through awk; and sh read -r
is not portable enough.

> Past this limit, config.status fails on HP-UX 11.00 and IRIX 6.5.

Thanks for reporting this.

Cheers,
Ralf