What is the reason for gb_Helper_abbreviate_dirs?

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 02/06/2015 12:58 PM, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Stephan Bergmann <sbergman at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Asking because I see no good reason for it and it repeatedly gets in my way
>> with its two major drawbacks:
>
> I think the goal was to avoid hitting commandline limits on windows -
> where the build indeed did hit those multiple times, both in make
> itself as well as in cygwin. But those cases are with lang=all
> usually, and are much better avoided by using temporary files with the
> lists of files to process, instead of listing hundreds of paths in the
> invocation line.

Right, gb_Helper_abbreviate_dirs can shorten the command line of the 
bash process spawned from make (though not the command lines of the 
actual commands in turn spawned from bash).  So if there are individual 
gbuild recipe lines composed from multiple shell commands, this could 
indeed be an issue.