Sean, We definitely want to support this ability (in our new quest to be more standards friendly, since we can’t ask others to follow standards if we don’t). Ideally BuildSystem would just know it is a package build and use those variables. Are there any special environment variables that only packagers use that we could detect to turn on this feature? Thanks Barry On Oct 9, 2014, at 5:16 PM, Sean Farley <[email protected]> wrote:

For purposes of building PETSc in a package manager setting, it would convenient to have a way to turn off the default behavior of not setting CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, etc. via environment variables.

The reason I bring this up is because in MacPorts (perhaps others) it is impossible to know the full set flags until the package is fully processed. See here for more details:

https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2014-October/028279.html

At the moment, I patch BuildSystem but was wondering if it'd be worth having a flag (or some other way) to do this.