I was looking in the manual to see what the default definition of AM_CFLAGS was. It's gone. Instead, all I see is this:
AM_CFLAGS This is the variable the Makefile.am author can use to pass in additional C compiler flags. It is more fully documented elsewhere. In some situations, this is not used, in preference to the per-executable (or per-library) _CFLAGS. It's not more fully documented elsewhere, though. AM_CPPFLAGS right about it is, however, fully documented right in this section. This should be fixed, since nowhere does the manual say that AM_CFLAGS is "-g -O2" by default.
