Re: bug work-around?

[Paul D. Smith]

%% "Albert D. Cahalan" <address@hidden> writes:

  adc> so I need to do something else. Oddly, I don't get the crash on
  adc> either x86 Red Hat 7 or PowerPC debian-testing.

A patch for this bug has been floating around for many months, so it's
possible the versions of 3.79.1 you're using on the other platforms have
been patched.

  adc> What I really want is a CFLAGS default that the user can
  adc> override, except that "-fpic" is always added when compiling the
  adc> library.

I don't think this will do what you want, then, even if it didn't
crash.  Command-line overrides take precedence over variable settings,
even target-specific variable settings.  You'd have to do this:

  $(LIBOBJ): override CFLAGS += -fpic

although I'm not sure if that actually works or not :).

Typically what one does is _NOT_ use CFLAGS for this; as per the GNU
standards you use a different variable in the makefile to store C
compiler flags and you let users have CFLAGS for their own use.  Then
you just put both variables into the compile line.

Often you leave the debug/optimize switches in CFLAGS so users can
override them easily.


As for a workaround, there's nothing really elegant I can think of that
doesn't involve recursion.

That's what has always bothered me about Miller's paper: he makes
non-recursive make all sound very cool, but when it comes to actual
thoughts about _how_ to implement something like this in a moderately
complex environment (which most are these days, what with auto* tools,
gettext, etc. etc.) there's mainly a lot of hand-waving... :).

-- 
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