SZEDER Gábor [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
Using a procedure whose output is fed to xargs has an advantage that
a platform with very short command line limit can still work with
many source files, but the way you create and use COCCI_SOURCES in
this patch would defeat that advantage anyway,
COCCI_SOURCES is only used as an input to 'xargs', so that advantage
is not defeated.
It is passed as a command line argument to "echo", that pipes to
xargs; I would not say it is taking advantage of "xargs" to lift the
command line length limit, as it first needs to convince the shell
to feed all of them to the "echo" that is upstream of "xargs".
As you mentioned elsewhere, LIB_H already uses the same approach as
I outlined in the message you are responding to (i.e. "don't define
a procedure to produce lines to the standard output in a $(MAKE)
variable--instead make the variable to hold the list itself"), so I
suspect that we are almost on the same page?