Building for release or debug

[Robert E. Griffith]

Does the bash build system support building optimized for debug and 
release?  How would I invoke them?

I find that doing "./configure; make" with no parameters builds bash 
with debug symbols but in the debugger (gdb inside atom editor with the 
dbg-gdb plugin), many interesting variables are marked "optimized out" 
so I wonder if I can build the project differently to make it more 
conducive to debugging.

On a different but related note, when I build my loadable builtin 
against the headers and loadables/makefile.inc from the ubuntu 
bash-builtin package. I still get symbols in my .so. Is there an option 
that I can specify to make that will build a release version?

--BobG