Re: Request for Help - Too many perl arguments as of 2.43.0-rc0

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Sat, Nov 4, 2023 at 3:59 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
> > Also, in the longer term, as you suggested, `xargs` is likely a more
> > fruitful solution.
>
> Hmph, the list of our test scripts exceed command line limit?  That
> sounds a bit nasty, as we somehow need to prepare a pipe and feed
> them into it, in order to drive xargs downstream of the pipe.
>
> Ideally if there were a GNUMake function that slices a list into
> sublists of "reasonable" lengths, we could use it to directly drive
> N invocations of check-non-portable-shell script instead of xargs,
> but I didn't find one.  Here is I came up with, using foreach that
> is "slice the list into many sublists of 1 element", but it made me
> feel dirty.

Indeed, that's ugly. I hadn't even put any thought into it since there
doesn't seem to be a pressing need for it.

In the long run, Ævar's idea of having `make` notice which, if any,
test scripts have changed, and only perform linting on an as-needed
basis may be the way to go[1,2,3], thus only passing a single script
as argument to each of the linters.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/220901.86bkrzjm6e.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/221122.86cz9fbyln.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com/
[3]: https://github.com/avar/git/commits/avar/t-Makefile-break-T-to-file-association