[enriquto]

> Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance

Sounds good, doesn't it? This means that efforts to produce a fully static distribution would imply a sweeping wave of fixes across a wide range of packages and build systems!

[chasil]

But your ideal UNIX has already come and gone.

"[Ultrix] never supported shared libraries or dynamically linked executables."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix

[anthk]

9front/plan9. Unix 2.0.

[machinestops]

The path of least resistance is to jam flags where they don't belong, sed patches, etc. Works well enough, so that's what ends up happening.