contemplated the idea of setting a default stack size other than 0 bytes? Reason being, many make check items fail because there is no (easy) opportunity to give the check programs at least a reasonable 32K or 64K stack. Is there any reason not to set a stack like this out of the gate and then increase as necessary as we do now?
Hey, but stack size is not 0 bytes by default! (at least in >=0.58). It's set as 64K. Look into stksize.[ch].
About Vincent's idea: something like this is already present. You say in mint.cnf "hey, give every process max. of XX KB for its TPA (i.e. for stack: TPA-text/data/bss segments)". And then, you can use either direct value for stack size (how it's now in mintlib, i.e. 64 KB) or you can use some of that magic values (0, -1, 1, 2 IIRC) which use some relative sizes (all of the remaining TPA, half, ...).
So this is quite OK. Only problem is when you set too little TPA and too big stack size. In that case you should see that message from mintlib ("too low TPA blah blah") but for some reason, in some cases, I've got bus error instead. I've made a little patch to crtinit.s but it wasn't perfect either so we rejected back to the old code.