CC, CXX et al in build, test and destroot phases

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 22, 2009, at 18:00, Toby Peterson wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 15:48, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> MacPorts sets the environment variables CC, CXX and so forth in the
>> configure phase only.
>>
>> Can anyone think of a reason why it should not also set these  
>> variables in
>> the build, test and destroot phases? It would save a lot of this  
>> kind of
>> thing for ports that have an unusual configure script, or none at  
>> all:
>>
>>
>> build.args-append               CC=${configure.cc}
>> destroot.args-append            CC=${configure.cc}
>
> Properly designed configure-based projects will pay attention to the
> environment and set things according... configuring it so that the
> build phase to consist of nothing more than "make".

I am aware of that. But we have a lot of ports for software which is  
not properly-designed.

Of my 81 ports, 11 need fiddling with ${configure.cc} at this time.  
Most of this could be removed if MacPorts base set CC et al during  
the build and destroot phases as I proposed.

> Ports that need
> environment variables during build are more of a special case. Current
> behavior is fine, and most correct.

Current behavior is annoying because it causes port authors to need  
to repeat certain common bits in their portfiles which could be moved  
into MacPorts base so that port maintainers don't need to worry about  
it. We should always be on the lookout for ways of simplifying  
portfiles by moving common functionality into base.

I feel this particular issue is especially important because most  
port maintainers probably don't know they should make sure the port  
uses ${configure.cc} (e.g. /usr/bin/gcc-4.0) instead of just "cc",  
not to mention that we have thousands of ports that have no  
maintainer which are not being looked after. Even for those that are,  
the port will probably not produce an error message for the  
maintainer if they do not take care to set CC. But the port may  
produce an error for some other user who has gcc_select'ed some other  
compiler. The whole reason the setting of CC=${configure.cc} etc. was  
added to the configure phase in base was to avoid problems for users  
who have gcc_select'ed something else, but this only works for  
software that have well-behaved configure scripts. If we can make  
this work automatically for additional ports, I feel we should do so.


So I ask again: can you think of any reason why we should not set  
these variables in the build, test and destroot phases? Can you think  
of any problems it would cause?