Geeky rant coming up

I'm trying to trace a bug in cantus3, a program for editing the metadata of MP3 and Vorbis files. Looking through the source, I see that I can turn on debugging information in this program by defining the preprocessor macro _DEBUG. So I run "fakeroot debian/rules CPPFLAGS=-D_DEBUG_ binary" and... it runs a bunch of g++ commands without that option. It also prints some odd progress messages. So I look deeper and find that this package is being built by some bizarre shell script and not a makefile or any other build system. The debian/rules sets CFLAGS but doesn't pass it into this script, which wouldn't pay attention to it anyway. furrfu. What kind of crack are these people smoking?

Oh, and some of the debugging code doesn't compile, anyway.