On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Roumen Petrov <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Roumen Petrov <bugtrack@roumenpetrov.info> added the comment:
>
> One of the problems that I see in that LDFLAGS is Makefile variable and
> Makefile is part of distribution for posix build systems.
> If you set specific LDFLAGS and you want to distribute own python build
> user will get you specific settings.
> One another environment variable is OPT (if compiler don't accept -R XXX
> may be -Wl,-rpath,XXX ?) and we may use it. Also OPT environment
> variable is also Makefile variable and user specific settings will go
> into distribution too :( .
>
> I quick look into distutils code show that sysconfig.py don't parse
> LDFLAGS and append environment variable LDFLAGS as is to the ldshared
> variable.
> So the first question is why setup.py parse only -L flags instead to
> pass variable value as is (aka sysconfig.py).

Because that's the use case I was supporting when I added the support;
I just needed the -L flags for compiling the extensions. If someone
writes a patch that makes it more generic it has a chance of being
checked in.

> The second question is why LDFLAGS is a Makefile variable ?

Because there is no guarantee that someone specified the envvar when
running setup.py, but if they were set for configure you know that
Python was built using those values.