Nut upsdev - Feb 2008 - m4 scripts ignore user-supplied CFLAGS and LDFLAGS

Hi all,

There is a discussion going on one russian forum about NUT
cross-compiling and packaging for some custom embedded firmware.
And one of the authors complained about NUT script for checking
ssl library ignoring supplied CFLAGS and LDFLAGS with the
desired include and library paths.
I checked several scripts in m4 folder and all of them do
something like this:

    CFLAGS_ORIG="${CFLAGS}"
    LDFLAGS_ORIG="${LDFLAGS}"

    CFLAGS=""
    LDFLAGS="..."

at the beginning. Is it for purpose? Why not check first with
the user-supplied variables?

I'm not very good in all this autotools magic so please
forgive me if this whole thing is dumb :)

P.S. What is the "right" way of passing custom paths (for a
cross-compilation environment)?

-- 
   Alexander