Revert to the canonical way of customizing CXXFLAGS
A default list of compiler flags is set via AM_CXXFLAGS Automake variable.
However this gets overridden by per-target CXXFLAGS variables (e.g.
foo_CXXFLAGS in case the foo target). Because of this you should append
$(AM_CXXFLAGS) to the end of the per-target CXXFLAGS variables (e.g.
foo_CXXFLAGS = ... $(AM_CXXFLAGS)).
After this default list of flags the contents of the CXXFLAGS user variable is
passed to the compiler. This variable has a default value determined by
configure (in case of g++ it is '-g -O2'). You can override this by specifying
CXXFLAGS when invoking make (e.g. make CXXFLAGS='-O3').