On Fri, 21 Sep 2012, David A. Wheeler wrote:
Bob Friesenhahn:
Yes. The only make-time override which has any business being used as
part of a formal build process is DESTDIR used with 'make install'.
Anything else is a hack. :-)
You may think so, but this capability is a clearly-documented promised capability under the GNU standards.
It may be a promised capability, but there are no formal tests for it,
and hardly any projects would think to add such tests. Anything which
is not specifically periodically tested is usually broken.
The common Automake 'make distcheck' test does not verify that the
project correctly obeys the many make/environment variables which
might be specified. The only make/shell variable it verifies is
DESTDIR.
Projects often break other standard capabilities as well. For
example, a great many projects (including highest-profile GNU
projects) break the function of specifying parameters like CFLAGS,
LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS to configure as described in the standard INSTALL
file. To me, failing to support a configure-time specification is
worse than failing to support an over-ride specified at make time via
an environment variable or make argument.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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