Ability to override compiler from environment

[Martin Buchholz]

The JDK's Makefiles are not coherent; they do not look like they
were designed using a common architecture.

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 3:17 PM, David Herron <David.Herron at sun.com> wrote:
> CC?=gcc
> CPP?=g++

A particularly egregious example is the use of the make variable CPP.
Some Makefiles use CPP to mean "C preprocessor", while some use it
to mean "C++ compiler".  The latter are non-traditional and should be excised.
We should use CXX instead to mean "C++ compiler"

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Yes,  users should be able to specifically override the C and C++
compilers used.  In practice, users can work around this clumsily by
creating a temp directory with symlinks for gcc,  g++, etc... and
setting ALT_COMPILER_PATH to that.

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I am in favor of the fundamental change to a "configure + make" model,
instead of configury stuff being done in the Makefiles as is the
current practice.

Martin