Re: bug report

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Francis Grolemund <address@hidden> writes:

  fg> In any case, we ran into a subtle bug that was partially caused by
  fg> our environment and how we've used gnumake, but I figured that
  fg> since its such a pain in the ass, you guys may want to know about
  fg> it.  The problem is only occurring on a Windows 2000 system.  To
  fg> give some background, we've written a sort of macro language that
  fg> created GNUMakefiles automatically to make it easier for
  fg> developers to write the makefiles.  In some cases developers were
  fg> exporting environment variables that were devoid of a value.  So
  fg> in other words, when arr2envblk() in misc.c started to accumulate
  fg> them into a block of memory for process_begin() in sub_proc.c,
  fg> some would be added in the form:

  fg>           foo=<null>
  fg>           bar=<null>
  fg>           baz=<null>

You're saying, they had the literal string "<null>" in the value?

Did these strings appear in the makefile you generated?  If so, this
sounds to me like a bug in your macro language.  Many C runtime
implementations of printf(), fprintf(), etc. try to be "helpful" and if
you give a NULL pointer to them where a %s should go, they print the
constant string "<null>".

In that case you should check for the NULL pointer and handle it,
something like:

  fprintf(fp, "%s=%s\n", variable, value ? value : "");


I'm not well-versed in the Windows-specific parts of the GNU make code,
but as far as I can tell GNU make would never construct an environment
variable of that syntax, from any input.

  fg> Apparently CreateProcess really dislikes this because it would
  fg> give a most unpleasant error, returning an ERROR_MORE_DATA from
  fg> GetLastError.  Although this makes sense now, the fact that it is
  fg> undocumented caused weeks of pain for us.

CreateProcess() is a Windows function, not a GNU make function... ?  I'm
not exactly sure what it is you are looking for here?

Thanks!

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