Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
> Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> added the comment:
> 
> [...]
>> As second step, I think that the CFLAGS environment variable passed to
>> configure should be made to init the BASECFLAGS Makefile variable, since
>> that's what the user would expect (if he knew how the system works).
> 
> I still think that such a patch would be flawed, because it *still*
> wouldn't follow the standards used in other OSS software, where setting
> CFLAGS overrides *ALL* settings that configure may have come up with.
> 
> So if a CFLAGS environment variables is to be considered, it needs to
> be considered correctly.

Fair enough, then let's do that.

If we go down that road, we'd have to remove BASECFLAGS, OPT and
EXTRA_CFLAGS and replace it with the single standard CFLAGS
variable, or use an approach similar to the one taken for CPPFLAGS
(ie. we allow these extra variables to further customize a CFLAGS
setting):

CPPFLAGS= @BASECFLAGS@ @OPT@ @EXTRA_CFLAGS@ @CFLAGS@

FWIW, the reason behind the extra variables is not really clear. They only
appear to factor out different aspects of the same thing:

r38847 | bcannon | 2005-04-25 00:26:38 +0200 (Mon, 25 Apr 2005) | 6 lines

Introduced EXTRA_CFLAGS as an environment variable used by the Makefile.  Meant
to be used for flags that change binary compatibility.

r30490 | montanaro | 2003-01-01 21:07:49 +0100 (Wed, 01 Jan 2003) | 10 lines

Split OPT make variable into OPT and BASECFLAGS.  The latter contains those
compiler flags which are necessary to get a clean compile.  The former is
for user-specified optimizer, debug, trace fiddling.  See patch 640843.

BTW: I've checked the use of LDFLAGS - this is added to LDSHARED
on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Perhaps this is something
special needed on BSDish system ?!