[ARG_MAX] execv: Argument list too long

[Pedro Giffuni]

Hi Thierry;

On Sun, 3 Nov 2019 18:32:14 +0100
Thierry Thomas <thierry at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> [Repost from FreeBSD-questions]
>
> I'm trying to upgrade the port french/aster to the latest stable
> release. This is a complex port: it has no Makefile (in the upstream
> tarball, but of course there is a Makefile for the port), and it uses a
> combination of setup.py (Python) and a bundled waf.
>
> At this point, it builds, but the latest step (linkage) fails with the
> following message:
>
> gfortran9: fatal error: cannot execute
> '/usr/local/libexec/gcc9/gcc/x86_64-portbld-freebsd12.0/9.2.0/collect2':
> execv: Argument list too long
>
> Yes, linkage is done by gfortran, in a classical way:
> gfortran9 (some -Wl parameters) (a very long list of object files .o) (a
> list of several libraries with their paths)
>
> but the problem is not caused neither by gfortran nor by the final
> linker: if I execute the same command line manually from my shell, it
> succeeds and the aster program is built.
>
> So I guess that the problem is caused partly by the arguments list, but
> also by the environment variables brought by the build system.
>
> On my machine, `getconf ARG_MAX' returns 262144.
>
> Is there a way to increase this value dynamically? Any idea?
>
> Thanks for reading!
> --
> Th. Thomas.

This is basically the same issue seen long ago with libreoffice:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208154

Please open a PR and add me. Code Aster is sufficiently important (at
least for me) that I think we should revise the limit.

Pedro.