Re: VC and too long command lines

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:55:28 +0200
> From: Deniz Dogan <deniz@dogan.se>
> 
> Of course, the command line was simply too long (approximately 66,000 
> characters) for my operating system to handle (Windows 7 64-bit).
> 
> What should Emacs do when this happens?
> 
> I think the most appropriate thing would be to add some functionality 
> which determines the maximum command line length for the current system 
> and if the call exceeds that length, tell the user about it.  Another 
> way would be to e.g. divide the commit into several smaller commits and 
> appending something along the lines of "(commit N of M)" to each commit 
> message.

The former.  The latter is impossible, because to know how to break a
command into several pieces you need to understand the semantics of
that command.  E.g., all pieces but the first might need some
additional command-line switch to tell the program to append the
results to the previous ones, rather than overwriting them.  As
another example, you'd need to use ">>" instead of ">" in all but the
first command.  Etc., etc.