DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS ¶Building the package involves running ‘./configure’. If you need
to supply additional flags to configure, define them in the
AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS variable in your top-level
Makefile.am. The user can still extend or override the flags
provided there by defining the DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS variable,
on the command line when invoking make.
It’s worth noting that make distcheck needs complete control
over the configure options --srcdir and
--prefix, so those options cannot be overridden by
AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS nor by
DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS.
Developers are encouraged to strive to make their code buildable
without requiring any special configure option; thus, in general, you
shouldn’t define AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS. GNU
m4 offers an example of when its use is justified, however.
GNU m4 configures by default with its experimental and
seldom used ‘changeword’ feature disabled; so in this case it is
useful to have make distcheck run configure with the
--with-changeword option, to ensure that the code for
changeword support still compiles correctly. GNU m4 also
employs the AM_DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS variable to
stress-test the use of --program-prefix=g, since at one point
the m4 build system had a bug where make
installcheck was wrongly assuming it could blindly test ‘m4’,
rather than the just-installed ‘gm4’.