'Argument list too long' in non-recursive setup

[Xan Lopez]

Hi,

we are using a non-recursive automake setup at the WebKitGTK+ project
(http://www.webkitgtk.org). Today, when adding two new files to the
sources list, I started getting this error when doing a 'make
distcheck':

niraikanai:~/git/WebKit/build/normal%make distcheck
{ test ! -d "webkit-1.1.12" || { find "webkit-1.1.12" -type d ! -perm
-200 -exec chmod u+w {} ';' && rm -fr "webkit-1.1.12"; }; }
test -d "webkit-1.1.12" || mkdir "webkit-1.1.12"
make: execvp: /bin/sh: Argument list too long
make: *** [distdir] Error 127

The problem is somewhere in the 'distdir' rule, as the output
suggests, where we are passing the whole source files list of WebKit
to a command, which overflows the reserved space in Linux for such
issues.

I'd be happy to hear of any workaround we could apply in our setup to
avoid this, but I suspect this needs fixing in the distdir.am file.
I've tried to look at it, but couldn't really figure out where it's
failing exactly (my lack of shell skills is not helping here...).
There's an odd thing, in that we iterate over the DISTFILES (of the
form 'file1 file2 file3...') with for file in list-of-files; do...
construct; AFAIK that will iterate through the lines in the input, so
I'm not sure of how can that be working (and I thought that we might
be failing to split the input in a place where we should be doing
that), but as I said I'm really a bit lost when it comes to shell
hacking.

Cheers, Xan