Usage of MAKEFLAGS

[Christof Warlich]

Hi,

in Debian buster, the Makefile debian/rules of the source package
elfutils has the following recipe:

build-stamp:  config.status
    dh_testdir
    $(MAKE) $(MAKEFLAGS)

I have tree questions here:

1. As short options show up in $(MAKEFLAGS) without the leading -, am I
   right to consider the above usage of MAKEFLAGS to be a bug?
2. Furthermore, is it true that any (sub)make honors all flags present
   in MAKEFLAGS anyway?
3. Finally, it looks somewhat inconsistent to me (and presumably, also
   to the maintainer of the elfutils package) that short options in
   MAKEFLAGS are lacking their leading -, whereas long options (that do
   not have a short option counterpart) do show up in MAKEFLAGS with
   their two leading --: Is this just for historic reasons?

I'd be happy to just get a 3 times "yes" confirmation, if reasonable :-).

Thanks,

Chris