Hi, I am another NixOS maintainer. Yes, it is true that ?= in makefiles is somewhat rare, and that we can work around this other ways. But it was I who proposed the ?= change on our side[1], so let say why I think it's the right choice:
Most C packages don't use "?=" and do FOO ?= foo but instead do have a configure script, so they do FOO = @FOO@ with regular "=". However that configure script *does* silently consume environment variables, so the effect is the same. I wouldn't request upstream add a configure script is nothing is needed, and I don't even like the implicitness of environment variables myself. But the fact is it is the standard for distros to communicate information to all the myriad build systems[2], so I advocate this change so distros can remove extra packaging hacks. The variable we need to override is PKG_CONFIG. One may right point out that other distros don't rename pkg-config, but that's because most derivations don't support cross compilation. NixOS does, but NixOS is not the only one: See also Exerho and their dnsmasq packaging[3] which has the same workarounds. We hope that cross compilation becomes less niche, but that means more people and projects will be affected by these sorts of things. Thanks for your consideration, John P.S. Sorry I am missing the right "in-reply-to"; I turned on message delivery after the original emails were sent, and do not know how to get the message-id from the pipermail archive. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/91422 [2]: Meson (e.g. see https://mesonbuild.com/Reference-tables.html#compiler-and-linker-flag-environment-variables) is a good example of grudgingly supporting environment variables just for this reason. [3] https://gitlab.exherbo.org/exherbo/arbor/-/blob/master/packages/net-dns/dnsmasq/dnsmasq-2.80-r3.exheres-0#L68 _______________________________________________ Dnsmasq-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dnsmasq-discuss
