Re: debug builds with NO optimizations

[Brian Dessent]

Bob Rossi wrote:

> Just out of curiosity, is this different than 'CFLAGS=-g ./configure
> ...'? I do this all the time and wonder if your way is somehow better.

If you happen to run into a package using older 2.13 autoconf, you have
to use the "CFLAGS=foo ./configure".  Otherwise you get this:

$ ./configure CFLAGS=-O2
configure: warning: CFLAGS=-O2: invalid host type
creating cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... Invalid configuration `CFLAGS=-O2': machine
`CFLAGS=' not recognized
checking target system type... Invalid configuration `CFLAGS=-O2':
machine `CFLAGS=' not recognized
checking build system type... Invalid configuration `CFLAGS=-O2':
machine `CFLAGS=' not recognized

Now before you scream that 2.13 is ancient, it still used in lots of
places for whatever reason.  The above example was from running the
toplevel configure script on the sourceware.org 'src' tree (which is
home to binutils, gcc, newlib, cygwin, gdb, and many others.)  Toplevel
is still stuck at 2.13 even though many subdirs have switched to modern
autoconf.

The "configure VAR=value" is the modern way but it breaks on older
versions, so "VAR=value configure" is easier to tell someone in an email
and expect it to work.

Brian