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ackalker

Member

Registered: 2012-11-27

Posts: 201

[SOLVED] Why do some PKGBUILDs use `make ${MAKEFLAGS}? Should they?

From running

$ git grep MAKEFLAGS

on the aur-mirror Git repo, I found that many PKGBUILDs there use

make ${MAKEFLAGS}

I'm wondering why they do this, and if it is really the right thing to do.

From searching the forum for posts mentioning 'makeflags', and browsing the first few pages of results, I got little more than snippets of PKGBUILDs using this idiom, but found no explanation as to why.

Given that
- makepkg exports MAKEFLAGS
- make uses the value of MAKEFLAGS from the environment and any other options from the commandline and processes them (e.g. for use by sub-makes) into its internal variable MAKEFLAGS
- make always exports MAKEFLAGS to recipes (unless unexported)

why pass ${MAKEFLAGS} to the make command at all?
Is it some kind of remnant from a time when makepkg didn't export MAKEFLAGS?

EDIT: Darn, I didn't go back far enough in time: the answer came up in this thread way back in 2008...
I'm off to fix my time machine

Last edited by ackalker (2013-07-10 04:25:04)