Makefile forces specific compilers

[aaaaaa123456789]

Variables like CC are set by the makefile ignoring the environment. Perhaps CC ?= gcc and the like would be better?

[fstirlitz]

make CC=clang CCLD=clang CFLAGS= works just fine; this is the usual way to override variables set in the Makefile. Not to mention ?= is probably GNU make specific. (I do use a couple of GNU make features, but that’s no reason to add more of them.)

[aaaaaa123456789]

I'm not thinking about using Clang, but using a different version of GCC, because a bare gcc doesn't point to the newest version I have installed. That being said, ignoring the environment is never a good idea; it's possible to do this the long way (via conditionals) if you don't like ?=.

In other words, if a user says export CC=foobar, they probably want to compile things using the foobar compiler, and it's rarely a good idea to ignore that request.

[fstirlitz]

Compilers are not, in general, interchangeable. The choice of compiler is something that should be done on a per-project basis, not as a blanket system-wide setting with the expectation that everything will pick it up transparently. And there is a way to override the default choice already: pass a CC= argument to make or just edit the local Makefile. Setting make variables with = is pretty standard even in projects that don’t case about portability to different versions of make. (Conditionals aren’t in POSIX make either, by the way.)

If I had something like a configure script, it may have looked up the CC environment variable to see which compiler the user prefers and whether to respect that choice (which isn’t a given!). But at the moment, the configure step is editing the Makefile manually.