WebKitGTK+ failing to build, argument list too long

Posted on September 23, 2012 by diegoe

The last few days I have been unable to build WebKitGTK+ from git.

The problem is that make chokes the command line with an insanely long list of file names. You need a patched version of make.

Pictured: myself debugging WebKit build issues.

Gustavo told me that WebKit has some handy jhbuild scripts that include a patched make.

Being WebKit-scale I knew the scripts did a lot more than what I wanted, so I just reused its moduleset for a quick buildone command:

$ cd WebKit/Tools/gtk/
$ jhbuild -m file://`pwd`/jhbuild.modules buildone make

And yes, it works! Thanks Gustavo.

This entry was posted in English, GNOME, planetdebian, planetgnome, Tips and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to WebKitGTK+ failing to build, argument list too long

  1. Jonathan says:
    September 23, 2012 at 8:43 pm

    (hm, let’s try that again)

    Has the bug been filed at
    http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=make
    and
    http://bugs.debian.org/make
    ?

  2. Ross Burton says:
    September 24, 2012 at 3:06 am

    You need a patched make to build webkit? That’s certainly a bold move…

  3. diegoe says:
    September 24, 2012 at 3:23 am

    Yeah. Pushing the limits of mankind. That’s webkit.

  4. xan says:
    September 24, 2012 at 4:47 am

    @Jonathan: we reported the bug a long time ago. A patch was made. In the end it was rejected to maintain compatibility with older UNIX systems.

    I guess we should try to either push that again or somehow change your build system to avoid this issue. Bugs in the toolchain suck.

  5. Stefano Teso says:
    September 24, 2012 at 6:15 am

    Is there any way to instruct jhbuild to use the patched make binary automatically?

  6. diegoe says:
    September 24, 2012 at 9:34 am

    @Stefano

    The jhbuilt make will be installed in $jhbuild-prefix/bin, so it will be used automatically.

    Just like anything in /usr/bin is after you just install it.

  7. ralpht says:
    September 24, 2012 at 3:16 pm

    I’m assuming that it fails linking WebCore, which is a really long argument list. Can you tweak the makefile to build a response file containing the arguments (ld will accept arguments in a file using the “@argsfile” command line syntax)?

  8. Alex says:
    September 24, 2012 at 7:17 pm

    Um…is it really necessary to call make with that many arguments? This just doesn’t smell right.

  9. mclasen says:
    September 24, 2012 at 7:24 pm

    When I was running into this a while ago, I found that make V=1 worked around it. Don’t ask me why.

  10. Jan de Groot says:
    September 25, 2012 at 1:43 am

    It builds with standard make when you use –disable-silent-rules.

  11. ncopa says:
    September 28, 2012 at 1:21 am

    any links to the mentioned patch(es)? Both to the gnu make patch and to the build system (the one that got rejected)

    I have the same issue and –disable-silent-rules does not help here.

    make: execvp: /bin/bash: Argument list too long

Comments are closed.