RE: Build errors on IRIX 6.5 using MIPSpro C compiler

[Lowell Johnson <ldjohn at usgs dot gov>]

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Billinghurst, David (CRTS) wrote:
> On Irix, the command line is reasonable short. "man sh" says: 
> Sometimes, particularly when using wildcards, the shell will fail to execute
> a command, and complain with the message
>         arg list too long
> This can often be avoided by using multiple commands, the xargs(1) command,
> or by increasing the ncargs kernel parameter with the systune(1m) command. 
> I have doubled the command line length from default of 20480 to 40960 with
> the command: 
>         systune ncargs 40960
> 
> This has helped with other applications that use libtool.  Haven't tried it
> with gsl.

Yes, those all appear to be solutions.  The actual "problem" line in the
build process appears to be the same on both Linux and IRIX.  After doing a
little newsgroup research, I've learned that Linux has a maximum environmental
buffer size of 128k on Intel, whereas (as you point out) IRIX defaults to 20480
bytes.  I confirmed our system to have ncargs set to 20480.

Unfortunately the systune command on IRIX seems to be a "root only" command,
since it involves updating the values for all users and modifying a system
file.  At some point we may request that the value of ncargs be increased.

The xargs solution would probably also work, but involves adding the
xargs command to the Makefile, not an ideal solution.

The other solution, breaking the library generation line into multiple
lines, also involves modifying the Makefile, but seems like a better
"portability" solution than using xargs.

Since our group is not presently concerned with shared libraries, I probably
won't pursue this problem any further at this time.  Thanks for the responses.

-- Lowell