Matthew Parry <mettw@shoal.net.au> writes: > > My idea for doing this is to have a DEBIAN_OM variable for the > -O and -m flags defined in each rules file so that you'll have > something like: > > DEBIAN_OM = -O2 -m486 > CFLAGS = -g -Wall > CFLAGS += $(DEBIAN_OM) Actually, I think that CFLAGS is made for just such a situation. Read the GNU standards document. It should be easy to pass CFLAGS=favorite flags to any rules file.