Re: environment variable conventions

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, David Lee wrote:
> Do you know whether (and if so, where) these things are documented?
> Whether they are classified as rules, recommendations, gentle advice etc.?
> Differences across variables (e.g. "CC" would replace, "CPPFLAGS" would
> normally prepend/append)?
>
> This is so I can offer documented advice (or references to "community
> conventions") to others in the project.

I have never seen these conventions formally documented.  Some 
packages violate them severely.  It is quite annoying to discover that 
a package ignores the user-provided CFLAGS (maybe supplying options 
which only work with GCC) or that when an include directory is added 
via CPPFLAGS, the package now ignores its own header files.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen