make: *** virtual memory exhausted. Stop.

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi,

I am looking for a workaround to what appears to be a make 3.80 bug. A
bit of googling turned up this:

%% Fabio Alemagna <address@hidden> writes:

  fa> That happens when using a construct like this:
  fa>     define function
  fa>     target: very long dependency list
  fa>               whatever
  fa>     endef

  fa> and then passign that to $(eval) trough $(call). By reading the ml
  fa> archives I got to know that this is a pretty old bug, which should
  fa> have supposedly been fixed in a release which, at the time, was
  fa> about to be made. However it appears that there have no been any
  fa> more releases since then... Am I to assume that this bug will
  fa> never be fixed (I read about the patch, but I also read it doesn't
  fa> work as it should)?

which pretty much looks like my problem. Since this email was written
back in 2003 and no stable release of make has been made since then,
this bug still bites some of my users who are unlucky enough to use the
macosx-provided gnu make which does not include the gnu make patches
used in pretty much every linux distribution under the sun (yes, my
Makefile works nicely on every linux distribution I tried it on, most
likely because of the patches applied by these distributions).

So, I am looking for a way to work around this small limitation of gnu
make. Is there something I could do to change the structure of my
Makefile to avoid this ?

In case someone wants to look at the whole makefile,
http://yans.inria.fr/code/yans/ contains a mercurial repo of the
Makefile I am using. i.e.: http://yans.inria.fr/code/yans/?
f=0c5bb9589bbc;file=rules.mk;style=gitweb


regards,
Mathieu
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