However, I think you trying to solve a non-issue,
I'm not trying to solve anything. I'm trying to suggest CFLAGS's
meaning should be documented in a place where maintainers might look
during development. I don't see how it hurts to add a sentence or two.
I.e., he will typically add some *_*FLAGS macros/AS_SUBST's and use them
inside of his hand-crafted Makefile.in's.
The whole reason I wrote is because I found that in one package (grep),
someone had added code to the configure.ac which added options to CFLAGS
(specifically, the result of `pcre-config --cflags`), obviously because
they did not know CFLAGS is intended for the user. The current Autoconf
documentation gives a misleading impression about that.
The programmer's mistake is completely understandable, of course, since
outside of GNU (and autotools), it is common to use CFLAGS for necessary
compilation options. All we can do is try to document it as best we
can. Hence my message.
