Re: UGLY_DEFS and command line length

[John W. Eaton]

On 03/02/2013 10:01 AM, Rik wrote:

> I broke up the sed patterns and put them in a file to work around the line
> limitations in the shell rather than in sed.  Doesn't that problem (bug
> #38372) still remain?  It seems like "cmd1 | cmd2" must initially be parsed
> by a single interpreter which means the overall command line length is
> still an issue.  Now that two UGLY_DEFS replacements have been taken out
> the line length may be under the original bug reporter's length, but that
> should probably be verified.

Oh, right. Well, did the original bug report ever identify exactly what 
shell it is that has this limit?

It may not matter now (it is 2013, right?) but I remember there was some 
old sed that had a limit of 100 expressions, so even if the command line 
length is OK, it may still be necessary to use two calls to sed.

Or, maybe we should just fix this some other way.  If we need to do more 
work on this, then maybe we could have configure generate shell scripts 
that we run in place of the $(do_subst_config_vals) Make macro.  Then 
the the target files that we generate can depend on the shell scripts 
instead of the Makefile.

jwe