[PD-dev] general makefile question

[Albert Graef]

IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:
> however, afaict, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS are commonly meant to be settable by
> the user, so setting those should not break the build system.

Exactly. Therefore a Makefile should *not* set CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, LDFLAGS
and the like, or only set them to some reasonable defaults which can be
freely overridden by the user. Of course this means that build-specific
options must be passed in the corresponding Makfile rules in addition to
these variables.

This is only a convention, of course, but it's part of the GNU Coding
Standards [1] and supported by automake and other build and packaging
utilities. Users and packagers have come to expect that it works that
way, so it's a good idea to follow this rule if you want to make users
happy.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command-Variables.html

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr.Graef at t-online.de, ag at muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag