On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 12:13:38 -0500 Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > This chapter has no relationship to any default BUILT INTO or REQUIRED > by GNU make; in fact there IS NO default value for CFLAGS built into > GNU make:
Hmm, well it seems to via autotools. But since this is not inescapable (which is what I first took this to mean, not being a big "make" user), no big deal. Sorry again for over-reacting. > Of course you can do what you like, but I should point out that the > recommendations from the GNU people are the best practices resulting > from decades of producing and using free software products. If I were > you I'd take advantage of that experience. I have every respect for GNU, but the justification used in that document is just patronizing: implying that normal users will be left "helpless" or that it represents a "devil-may-care" attitude. I have been programming long enough to recognize that is someone's opinion, and not a general truth. Dare I say that presenting it so strongly is a little "unprofessional"? Justifications WRT to distro packaging issues, however, seem much more reasonable. However, my conundrum is that I do not think this is a good default for people who build from source: years ago, when I was a new linux user and used to build stuff from source a lot, I was in the habit of stip-all'ing. Now I only source build for particular things, and I suppose I got out of this habit for a while and forgot about it. So I was surprised this morning to recognize that most of the binaries in my /usr/local had debugging symbols! And after stripping *, I noticed that gvim loads much quicker, heh-heh. Point being: while users of the source can opt for this (if they know), it just seems like a bad policy to by default leave them with a product that needlessly wastes a considerable amount of memory and may not perform as well as it could. I believe most of my users do build from source (and often could be new to the process), so it is not very satisfying for me to "add a note to the README", etc, in order to accommodate distro packaging. It seems to me that since the packagers *in general* should be considered more expert, the onus should be on them to "./configure CFLAGS=[our flags]". Obviously this is against the grain, but I do not really want to kowtow to a "Goliath rules David" type extortion whereby the distros say, your default build *must* contain debugging symbols. I suppose that might mean having to maintain a slightly different package just for them; no big deal, but still I think a poor compromise consequential of bad policy. MK -- "The angel of history[...]is turned toward the past." (Walter Benjamin)