My goal was to make it generic. SCons and Waf support the "-j" option, but that is coincidental. MAKEFLAGS is for make; why tweak it to make it work with other build systems? And, if other build systems support some options (for debugging, for output supression, for whatever), we need a way to tell them. I'm not sure and I can't test it, but I think that your example would be broken if MAKEFLAGS was "-j N" instead of "-jN". Anyway, this was just about names. In practice, and as you point out, you can safely assume that every modern build system accepts "-j". Thanks, Kalrish
