Re: git build failure with libssl (OpenSSL) in custom directory

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Lars Buitinck wrote:

> Yes, that works fine with LDFLAGS= in the Makefile. Is this just a
> lack of Makefile-fu on my part?

In general, "make" likes to get its variable assignments on the
command line rather than from the environment.  This way, Makefile
authors do not have to worry about keeping variable names in a
tightly reined namespace.

On the other hand, it can be convenient to set up the environment
with flags that would be used for multiple builds.  Different
projects deal with that differently:

./configure takes certain values (including LDFLAGS) from the
environment in autotools-using projects.  ./configure --help=short
lists them.

The Linux kernel build system has a separate (namespaced) set of
variables it reads from the environment.  Example: exporting
KBUILD_OUTPUT=$HOME/.cache/linux-2.6 in .profile would save me from
typing "make O=$HOME/.cache/linux-2.6" every time I build the kernel.
They are documented in Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt.

Git reads settings from a config.mak file in the toplevel of the
git source tree.  So one can set

	LDFLAGS = -L$(HOME)/opt/git/lib

there and it will be used for all builds.