On Mon, 2021-07-05 at 11:33 +0200, Christof Warlich wrote: > build-stamp: config.status > dh_testdir > $(MAKE) $(MAKEFLAGS) > > I have tree questions here: > > 1. As short options show up in $(MAKEFLAGS) without the leading -, am I > right to consider the above usage of MAKEFLAGS to be a bug?
Yes. That makefile is wrong. > 2. Furthermore, is it true that any (sub)make honors all flags present > in MAKEFLAGS anyway? Yes. MAKEFLAGS is not intended to be used in recipes at all. It's a method for a parent make to communicate to a child make through the environment, not through the command line. > 3. Finally, it looks somewhat inconsistent to me (and presumably, also > to the maintainer of the elfutils package) that short options in > MAKEFLAGS are lacking their leading -, whereas long options (that do > not have a short option counterpart) do show up in MAKEFLAGS with > their two leading --: Is this just for historic reasons? Mostly. Long-ago makefiles would use "-$(MAKEFLAGS)" in their recipes so this is for backward-compatibility with those makefiles. However POSIX does require that MAKEFLAGS be allowed to have either leading hyphen or non-leading hyphen so some of the confusion is required by the standard. The correct behavior of makefiles is to never add $(MAKEFLAGS) to the recipe when invoking a sub-make. As above, this value is intended to be passed _through the environment_, not _on the command line_.
