bug#19579: Long lines, short awk

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2015 01:01:44 -0500, Daniel Richard G. wrote:
> I am building a source package, prepared with Automake 1.15, on HP-UX.
> While running the configure script, I get
>
>     [...]
>     config.status: creating include/Makefile
>     config.status: creating scripts/Makefile
>     config.status: creating src/Makefile
>     config.status: creating src/lib/Makefile
>     awk: Input line         -rm -rf ../../src/l cannot be longer than 3,000 
> bytes.
>      The input line number is 21137.
>      The source line number is 235.
>     config.status: error: could not create src/lib/Makefile
>
> It so happens that src/lib/Makefile covers a large number of source
> files, spread out across many directories. Line 21137 of Makefile.in is
> the "-rm -rf" line shown below:
>
>     distclean: distclean-am
>             -rm -rf ../../src/lib/libobj/$(DEPDIR) foo/bar/$(DEPDIR) 
> foo/baz/$(DEPDIR) ...
>
> The line includes every single subdir-objects subdirectory known to the
> makefile, and is well over 15kB long. The maintainer-clean target also
> has an identical line.

can you provide an example that reproduces the issue ?  or link to the package
you're working on (assuming it's OSS) ?  i checked my own projects and it didn't
create a single line, it generated a bunch of independent rm commands.  i looked
through the automake source and couldn't quickly identify something that would
explain the behavior you're seeing.
-mike