[Lynx-dev] configure-script issue

[Mouse]

I wrote, earlier today, of trying to rebuild a past lynx install,
saying

> This led me to rediscover that the configure script for that version
> appears to be broken.

I fetched the current .tar.bz2, which unpacked into lynx2.9.0dev.10.
Turns out the configure script is still broken, just in a trivially
different way.  (Aside from all the ways that inhere in using configure
scripts at all, that is.)

Specifically, when I run it with CC set to cc -g, in order to get -g on
all compiler runs, the configure script calls this broken.  The old
script then claimed this was a misuse of $CC.  The modern script
doesn't call it _mis_use, but it does still - like the old one -
complain and pull the -g off $CC and put it...somewhere else; configure
code is sufficiently twisted I'm not entirely sure where.

So if I'm going to end up building 2.9.0dev.10, I'm going to have to
resurrect the kludge I used before: create a script (I called it cc-g)
that runs cc -g "$@", and tell configure to use that.

But this leads me to ask: why do this?  Is there something wrong with
wanting a specific option on _all_ cc runs?  Or is there some other way
to specify that?  Doing this has worked with every other such thing
I've tried, and it strikes me as remarkably obnoxious for the script to
think it knows better than I do how the compiler should be run in my
environment, forcing me to workarounds such as the cc-g script I
sketched above.  (I notice other examples of this, such as the way it
maps c[1-9][0-9] to clang with some option, if clang is detected;
fortunately, I'm not trying to use clang, so I can ignore that in
practice - but there certainly are plenty of ways it could cause the
build to break when just using what the user told it to would work.)

But lynx is so sane in so many other respects this quite stands out,
leading me to ask what's behind it and why the complaint doesn't
explain either why it's a bad idea to want to specify options on all cc
runs or what the correct way to do so is.

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