It is true in general, but it is also a matter of a personal taste. If the openldap project use a buildboot that set in the environment these variables , that patch is useless. This is also partially true if the openldap developer use to set these variables in their personal environment, because other contributor could not do the same. Other project use a similar patch , for example popt 1.17 devel and git 1.8 in master, i am the author so i know . what is more openldap now are not using automake and the little test environment that automake could use, so i have some difficulty to understeand what is this alternative "test environment" . Perhaps i have missed something ?
I meant the environment of the shell tests are run from. IMHO, I'd consider setting those macros a developer's conscious choice rather than a normal user's act. Moreover, they're specific to glibc, while users might want to use different malloc implementations, or build on platforms where glibc is not available, so the fact they're not honored might not be obvious. My 2c, of course.
p.