Bug#764580: m4 eats memory for breakfast (fwd)

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

I received the following report from the Debian bug system:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andreas Henriksson <address@hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <address@hidden>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 11:21:12 +0200
Subject: Bug#764580: m4 eats memory for breakfast

Package: m4
Version: 1.4.17-4
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

While trying to investigate a reported issue in util-linux
I was going to attempt a git bisect but I wasn't even able
to build the old version.

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/pkg-util-linux.git util-linux
cd util-linux
git checkout v2.20.1
./autogen.sh
   autopoint:  /usr/bin/autopoint (GNU gettext-tools) 0.19.2
   aclocal:    aclocal (GNU automake) 1.14.1
   autoconf:   autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.69
   autoheader: autoheader (GNU Autoconf) 2.69
   automake:   automake (GNU automake) 1.14.1
   libtoolize: libtoolize (GNU libtool) 2.4.2
^C

Before aborting, m4 was observed to have allocated 38g ram (and
counting)....

[...]