Hi Mat,
Just to add my $0.02 here: I’ve been complaining about the current makelocalrc behavior for over a year now. In my experience, our HPC systems generally have an OS installed when the system is initially brought up, and that image is not updated very much over the life of the system. So, we end up with very old GCCs in /usr/bin, which no one uses! The actual programming environment is provided through modules, so the “correct” GCC is the one found on the PATH.
I’ve got an ugly script that generates a localrc file using all the -gcc etc. flags, but it would be a lot nicer to just have makelocalrc use the GCC on the path.
Paul