GNU configure magic prepending instead of replacing --mandir?

[Hauke Fath <hf%spg.tu-darmstadt.de@localhost>]

Hi,

looking at an editors/xemacs-current build error on Solarish, I had 
reason to explicitly GNU configure with --mandir=, both because the 
package is special in not specifying the subdir in the install target, 
and because FWER the Solarish build* ended up with PREFIX/share/man.

Unfortunately, that didn't work, and it looks like the options added to 
CONFIGURE_ARGS _prepend_, not replace, a long string of default options. 
In particular, the long string has --mandir 
${GNU_CONFIGURE_PREFIX}/${PKGMANDIR} as set in 
mk/configure/gnu-configure.mk, which apparently takes precedence over 
whatever the package Makefile wants to set.

Is this precedence, which would make setting (at least some) configure 
options from a package Makefile pointless, known and/or documented?

In the end, I set GNU_CONFIGURE_MANDIR to what I need it to be.

Cheerio,
Hauke


* 
<https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstream-trunk/20230628.2250/xemacs-21.5.35nb2/install.log>

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