Re: GNU Make 4.4.1 fails in a spectacular fashion on NetBSD 10.0 AMD64

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2024-04-19 at 09:54 -0400, Dennis Clarke via Bug reports and
discussion for GNU make wrote:
> Where does one even begin to discover where something ( everything? )
> went so horribly wrong?

The very first thing you should try is re-configuring GNU Make without
any special flags (unset CFLAGS) and re-run configure from scratch and
see if that build works better.

As far as I can tell the problem is because you're including this:

  -fno-builtin

in your CFLAGS.  I'm not sure why you want to do that, but I recommend
removing that, at least.  I don't actually know exactly why that causes
a problem but it's completely clear from the test results that the
problems you're having are due to bad memory which means I agree with
you it's due to this alloca mismatch/issue.  I can't say why the
problem happens: either GCC's handling of -fno-builtin has an issue or
else the configure script's detecting of the situation is not working
correctly.

> /opt/bw/build/make-4.4.1_NetBSD_10.0_amd64.001/src/ar.c:315: warning:
> Warning: reference to the libc supplied alloca(3); this most likely
> will not work. Please use the compiler provided version of alloca(3),
> by supplying the appropriate compiler flags (e.g. -std=gnu99).

Clearly this warning is not fully grokking your situation.  The most
likely reason for this mismatch in general is someone adding -std=c99
which of course disables extensions like alloca so that's what the
warning says, but it's not looking at what you ACTUALLY have set on the
compiler command line.  You do have -std=gnu99 but this warning didn't
notice that you also have -fno-builtin and that's the real reason for
this issue.