Best way to deal with ARFLAGS

[jwbee]

Yesterday I needed to bazelize my build of icu4c and the way configure_make emits ARFLAGS to the environment, and the way ICU consumes ARFLAGS, are not compatible. Specifically, right here:

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/289d9703a03494ef0d9dfec122169b22bd9fc84f/icu4c/source/icudefs.mk.in#L120

ARFLAGS = @ARFLAGS@ r

With typical toolchain setup, this results in an invocation ar rcsD r name.a name.o which is not valid. I don't think I'm the first person to face this problem, as I found this hack for building rdkafka with configure_make at https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/main/bazel/foreign_cc/BUILD#L65. I worked around my ICU issue with a similar hack: making ARFLAGS= be the first argument to configure so it overrides the ARFLAGS that bazel is setting in the environment.

The whole issue seems a bit gross, though. Is the argument format of ar just impossible to deal with? Is this best fixed in ICU or in bazel?

[attilaolah]

A bit late to join here, but instead of specifying ARFLAGS as part of the targets, you could instead pass args = ["--environment-overrides"] to make(…). That way, the already-defined ARFLAGS from the environment should take precedence over the ones coming from the Make files.

Not sure whether this would resolve your issue, but it did seem to work for me in another package.