Re: proposal: Default settings from environment

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Neal D. Becker writes:
 > On Tuesday 11 March 2003 12:16 pm, Phil Edwards wrote:
 > > > I think an easy way to do this would be for gcc to read default values
 > > > from the environment.  I imagine it would not be difficult to add such a
 > > > patch.
 > > >
 > > > Before I submit a patch, I'd like to know what others think about this
 > > > idea, or would anyone like to propose an alternative.
 > >
 > > It's been proposed many times before.  The reason this is not done by
 > > default is that it makes bug hunting more difficult; now the "default"
 > > environment cannot be easily predicted based on the platform.  Your users
 > > might then report bugs to us that we have no way of reproducing, because
 > > the -foo option was in use without the user ever having typed it.
 > >
 > 
 > This is a good point.  I think that if gcc -v reported all options,
 > including settings from the environment, that this problem would be
 > addressed.  When reporting bugs, users are supposed to include the
 > output of gcc -v, right?

I'm a bit mystified by this.  Why can't you use $CC instead of gcc,
with $CC set to "gcc arg arg..."  ?

Andrew.