How can I override CXXFLAGS?

[bholland]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a project that I joined and I noticed that the flags are all
a mess. When a flag called --enabled-debug was set it it sets 

AM_CXXFLAGS="$AM_CXXFLAGS -g -Wall -O0"
AM_LDFLAGS="$AM_LDFLAGS -g"

but when I compile all of my stuff, the CXXFLAGS variable is set to -g -O2
which completely negates the ability to debug. Likewise, I want to set
LDFLAGS to actually link the compiled libraries first as oppose to anything
that I have installed. I don't think this is a problem as LDFLAGS apparently
doesn't have a default for autoconf, or at least not one that overrides. 

I am actually surprised that autoconf decided that the default CXXFLAG set
was not empty. I am sure there are reasons for that, but to me it causes
more harm than good. I set AM_CXXFLAGS with the expectation that if I don't
explicitly set CXXFLAGS, that I get to use whatever I set for AM_CXXFLAGS
but that is not the case. Even in build mode

AM_CXXFLAGS="$AM_CXXFLAGS -O3"

will be overridden to be -g -O2 by CXXFLAGS. 

Basically, what I want is the expected default behavior. I want to set
CXXFLAGS to nothing by default unless it has been specified by the user. It
is very strange that this is not how it works so I suppose I am also curious
as to why this is the case. 

Thanks,
~Ben



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