I'm working on a Debian-based distribution (not Debian-derived since I'm recreating all source packages from scratch; but I am sticking to a lot of the Debian conventions as far as package naming). Right now it's just for me, though in the future I might consider making it public. The basic idea of the distribution is that I want it to use as few patches as possible to the upstream sources - to the point that if a non-essential package currently doesn't build without patches, then I'll refuse to package it at all, or I'll remove it after a probation period. I also want to stick as close as possible to the default builds of each package, e.g. use a minimum of explicit configure script flags. (Modulo requirements from other packages, e.g. in pcre I'm forced to enable the non-default UTF8 support so that glib will function. And this does unfortunately mean that the system is using /usr/lib64.)
However, I've discovered that on my custom system, debhelper currently sets empty environment variables for CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. which results in decidedly non-default builds for many packages. So, I think what I would want would be that my Dpkg::Vendor::UnFrobbed module would cause dpkg-buildflags to return no output at all, not just empty output for each variable. Given that, would it make sense to add interfaces in Dpkg::BuildFlags to remove all entries entirely from the internal hash tables, and/or to remove one particular entry? -- Daniel Schepler
