On Mon, 2010-08-09 at 12:41 -0700, Philip Prindeville wrote: > Alas much of this is beyond my control, and it's not a single project: > it's a Linux distro having a couple of hundred projects, many of which > have several directories deep of makefile nesting.
Ah, well, you didn't say so :-). One would suspect that if these are Linux distro packages, these packages are all, or at least mostly, autoconfiscated. Autoconf (or more specifically in this case, automake) obeys the GNU programming standards which requires the behavior I already mentioned: that CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. are all reserved for use by the user, and they can be overridden on the make command line without bad effects. Basically they work just as I mentioned above. Of course, there are always some people who don't like autoconf and think it's too difficult, and instead create their own build/configure systems. Well, these systems either ignore all the use-cases that make autoconf difficult in the first place, and thus do not support the features that people need in uncommon environments, and hence are not useful/usable for any installation that doesn't closely match the authors'; or else they're complicated in their own, non-standard way which means more effort for the user (that's you) when they want to build things. Anyway. What was I talking about? Oh yes. Nevertheless most makefile developers have resolved this issue one way or another, already. So you shouldn't need to (and you shouldn't WANT to) rewrite all their makefiles. You just have to learn how they did things. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <psm...@gnu.org> Find some GNU make tips at: http://www.gnu.org http://make.mad-scientist.net "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
