Re: .ONESHELL enhancement?

[Matt McCutchen]

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 08:39 +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > > If there's any kind of length limitation with -c (whether from the shell
> > > > or the OS), possible alternatives would include running $(SHELL) and
> > > > piping the script to its stdin, or writing the script to a temporary
> > > > file and running "$(SHELL) TMPFILE".
> > > 
> > > How come GNU make doesn't do this (on all systems) then?
> > 
> > Because it's slower, I imagine:
> 
> Well, do it only if the command line length would otherwise be exceeded,
> of course.  That way you avoid any regressions that could stem from
> detectability of the way it was invoked.

It sounds like your argument is, if the existing technique would fail
due to the length limit, we aren't breaking anything by switching to a
different technique.  I don't buy that because:

1. It may be hard to predict 100% accurately whether a particular
command on a particular OS would exceed the limit, and in any case I'm
skeptical about adding such code to make.

2. A user might rather see the original "argument list too long" error
than have make switch to a different approach that potentially fails
later in a different way.

-- 
Matt