On 08/22/2012 07:12 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Wed, 22 Aug 2012, Del Merritt wrote:
[Reponding on-list to what was Diego's private response to me; I hope
he doesn't mind.]
I just finished an experiment with a single libfoo.a and all
many-thousands of sources for libfoo_a_SOURCES. The compilation
worked, but I got the dreaded "make[1]: execvp: /bin/bash: Argument
list too long" message when it tried to do the "ar". To the shell's
credit, the command line appears to be 134K bytes/characters in
length, so I can understand why it would choke. This doesn't bode
well for the various "dist" targets.
In case it is not clear, when a libtool convenience library is used,
all of the object files are extracted from the .a file and then the
object files are passed to the linker. If you were to successfully
build the archive, the doom might just be postponed to the link step.
This was my concern. And in fact it is why my original hand-build
makefiles created libraries instead of a single mass of source and the
resultant ".o" files.
In a non-recursive build, it really should be better to simply
encapsulate the collections of objects to use (equivalent to a
convenience library) into make variables and then tell automake to use
those when the dependent libraries or executables get built.
Libtool is supposed to take steps to limit command line length to the
tested limits. Apparently this did not work for you.
Nope, and as noted earlier in this thread, the dist targets were seeing
the line-too-long issue from the start.
I am a little surprised that this problem isn't more common for "large"
projects. In my particular project, I *could* make each subdirectory
more independent with its own makefile. But in the spirit of "Recursive
make considered harmful", I see either a loss in dependency checking or
increased complexity, along with build order concerns, since each
subdirectory really doesn't stand on its own.
I had opted for libtool in part because I hope to eventually support a
shared library option and in part because it gives me "--enable-static"
and "--disable-shared" as "free" options to configure. This is
important for my builds since I use other, external (3rd party)
autoconf-controlled packages.
I'm still hoping for some collective wisdom on how to wrangle the large
set of files that comprise my project.
Thanks,
-Del
