Circular variable_set_lists

[Norman Wilson]

I'm using make-3.81beta4 on Solaris SunOS 5.9 compiled with Sun cc 5.5.

I have a large non-recursive make system which builds around 250
directories of source code. I'm seeing make hang after building roughly
half the source. Running up the debugger I see that it's actually going
round in circles in the function variable.c:target_environment. This is
due to the variable list associated with the target file being circular.
The outer loop:

for (s = set_list; s != 0; s = s->next)

is non-terminating because at some point s->next is somehow ending up
pointing back at a previous member of the list.

I'm using the same make system to build the same source tree on Linux
(Red Hat enterprise 2.6.9-22.0) using make 3.80 and everything works
fine, so this is clearly a platform issue. I'm speculating that the
error is due differences in the behaviour of malloc on the two platforms
- ie on Solaris malloc is giving back a previously used
variable_set_list object with an (accidentally) valid next pointer. But,
this is idle speculation.

The bug is easily reproducible but only with a large set of makefiles.

Is this a known issue? I having found anything in the achieves relating
to it.



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