Re: mumble+= foo

[Akim Demaille]

| The uninitialized values are another instance of the `unknown' source
| extensions bug reported earlier.

Thanks, I'm applying it.

| In Automake 1.4 my `LDFLAGS+= -nostartfiles' line was output as
| `LDFLAGS= -nostartfiles' in Makefile.in, thanks to those warnings I
| just realized that.

Thanks :)

| But that's not what I want: basically I'd like to
| inherit @LDFLAGS@ from Autoconf and append -nostartfiles to it.
| Apparently automake is just trying to do that in the opposite way
| (append first, and define after).
| 
| Of course I will fix my Makefile.am by using `LDFLAGS= @LDFLAGS@ 
-nostartfiles'
| but if would be nice if the += could work for inherited variables,
| it sounds pretty natural to me.

Yep, but a pain in the neck to implement.  Yet semantics when
conditionals are used is to be defined.

My very humble opinion is that for the time being the current behavior
is the right one.  Once we clean the handling of conditionals etc.,
*if* it appears to be easy to implement, then let's go for it.
Otherwise it's too complex a code to implement for a (IMHO) poor
feature.

Once we have that, someone will want to be able to *prepend* instead
of appending etc.