Bug 720180 – sys-apps/portage: add support to delay export of "A" variable until last moment

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Zac Medico 2020-04-30 19:52:15 UTC]

For current EAPIs, PMS specifies that the "A" variable should be exported. For very large values of the "A" variable, this causes execve to fail with an "[Errno 7] Argument list too long" error as discussed in bug 719202.

In order to prepare for future EAPIs where the "A" variable will not be exported, it would make sense for portage to delay export of the "A" variable until the last moment. In theory, and ebuild could use "export -n A" to suppress "[Errno 7] Argument list too long" errors when spawning subprocesses.

[Comment 1 Zac Medico 2020-05-26 04:36:08 UTC]

Patch posted for review:

https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage-dev/message/2c620e1f1b1b05a6af4c0ba9a3d81ad7
https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/552

[Comment 2 Zac Medico 2024-08-18 21:53:06 UTC]

(In reply to Zac Medico from comment #0)
> In order to prepare for future EAPIs where the "A" variable will not be
> exported, it would make sense for portage to delay export of the "A"
> variable until the last moment. In theory, and ebuild could use "export -n
> A" to suppress "[Errno 7] Argument list too long" errors when spawning
> subprocesses.

They could use "export -n A" in theory, but it wouldn't be practical, so I'll close this bug in favor of bug 721088.