HELP: make crashes on Win98 but not on NT

[Tadeusz Liszka <tad at comco dot com>]

I have fairly large code built using make on Unix, and (using CygWin) also on
NT. On Windows the process utilizes VC++ and Digital Fortran, but make and some
small preprocessing is done with gcc/perl/lex/yacc/...

Recently we had some crashes of the NT executable when using it on Win98, (our
demo laptop) so I went to the trouble of configuring it for the make - install
compilers, CygWin, WinCVS etc. oping I will get proper environment for
debugging. I failed with make: it almost works but it is very unreliable,
crashes randomly and although popups claim that make is causing access violation
my diagnosis is that there is some memory overrun due to the sheer size of the
filelist but it is inside the command module.
I really do not believe that GNU make could have memory problems, unless there
are some CygWin/98 specific limitation in the system access routines.

For each submodule, the make creates soft-links in the _objs directory, and
later creates object files there. It crashes after succesful compilation of the
module with 250 files, while executing 'cat tmp >> ../filelist'. Interestingly
enough when I trimmed the actual list of source files to only one, it was still
crashing, and worked ok when I cleaned all files from _objs directory, and let
make rebuild them. 

Now I split the largest module into two smaller ones, and it seems to work ok
but only up to the time (I have to fire submakes by hand, and sometimes have to
resort to rebooting Windows), so I think that the memory problem is still there
and once it shows it corrupts the Win98 kernel areas.

Questions:
1. Is it known / observed problem with Windows98 ?
2. Is there something in the setup to avoid these limtations ?
3. Should I use make not from the standard shell ? I tried Win95Cmd.exe which
was posted on this maillist few months ago (it is actually NT command
interpreter) with no visible changes. If I start make from inside emacs - maybe
it will work better?

Details:
Pentium 100 with 48MB RAM and Windows 98 Second Edition or
Pentium 2 300 with 128 MB and Windows 98
Config.sys has only shell=.. line suggested by CygWin readme
On NT I usually run make from tcsh prompt, On 98 I had some path problems (tcsh
inserted ';' for every space in names - 'Program Files' is everywhere) and
instead of fixing it I went to bash. Otherwise the setup on 98 is identical to
that on NT, which does not cause me eny problems.



Any suggestions will be appreciated.
-- 
Tadeusz
:: The public opinion should be alarmed by its own nonexistence
:: (512)467-0618 ext. 526 ::       Stanislaw J. Lec, trans. TJL

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