Bob Atkins wrote:
> 
> As usual Martin is just flat wrong in his insistence that a defined
> CFLAGS must overide any generated CFLAGS by configure to be consistent
> with other OSS. But of course that is just his excuse for not accepting
> this bug and fix. If it wasn't this assertion then he would find
> something else equally absurd.

I don't think so... we have to support multiple platforms
and doing so is rather difficult in the light of different
requirements and often missing ability to actually test on the
various platforms.

The configure/make system we have in Python has grown a lot over
the years and many people have contributed to it. As a result, it's
not as clean as it could be and there are many aspects that require
inside knowledge about the platforms.

Martin is right in saying that a CFLAGS environment variable has
to override the value determined by configure... see e.g.

http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/autoconf/Preset-Output-Variables.html

However, the situation is a little more complex: CFLAGS should
normally *not* be used by the Makefile for things that configure
finds or regards as not user customizable.

Unfortunately, Python's Makefile does not work that way. It
builds its own CFLAGS value out of a combination of other
variables.

It should really be building a new variable based on CFLAGS and
the other variables and then use that in the build process.

The PY_CFLAGS variable appears to be a start in that direction,
though it's not being followed through.

What makes the situation even more complex is that C extensions
built with distutils will also use these variables for compilation,
so any changes to the way the variables work will have direct effect
on whether or not extensions build out of the box.