Re: 2.59d on OpenServer

[Kean Johnston]

> Between 2.59 and 2.59e we have changed macros to not expand to long
> lines in the resulting scripts, but apparently some shells not only
> have limits in the line length, but also in the length of the assignment
> string; now, Kean's message above seems to imply that this length
> limitation is _before_ variable expansion, not afterwards.  Is that
> really the case?  IOW: is (a forward-ported and bug-fixed version of)
> the patch above still necessary for 2.59e?
Certainly hen I was testing this, the patch in the URL you
mentioned fixed the immediate problem I had, where the
extremely long assignment of ac_subst_vars was causing the
shell to blow up.  But in that case, each word was very small,
and simply changing from:

  ac_subst_vars="word1 word2 word3"

to

  ac_subst_vars="word1"
  ac_subst_vars="$ac_subst_vars word2"
  ac_subst_vars="$ac_subst_vars word3"

fixed the problem. The actual line length limitation *appeared*
to be the contents of the quoted string, *before* expansion.
But I have just tried to create a small isolated test case
that simply has:

  #!/bin/sh
  LONGVAR="WORD WORD WORD ..."
  echo "$LONGVAR"

for an extremely long list of "WORD WORD ...." (about 70K)
and its working just fine. So the limitation isn't immediately
obvious. Something about the way a configure script is run, or
what it does at startup or something else is what is causing
the limitation to be reached.

I will play around with this some more and try to get to the
bottom of it, because that may help lead me to where to look
in teh shell to avoid this ridiculous limitation. Mind you,
assigning 12K of text in a single assignment is a bit on
the ridiculous side too :)

But my gut feeling, and my vague recollections of the problem
lead me to believe that the limitation is before expansion,
not after.

Kean

--
"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those
 whom we cannot resemble." -- Samuel Johnson