Makefiles and dependencies

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

How difficult it would be to implement something like dependencies in makefiles?

Concrete example: In steptalk I have GDL2 module that depends on the GDL2 
library/frameworks. I would like it to be built automaticaly, when GDL2 is 
available, othervise not.

Can this dependency checking be implemented without configure scripts?

GNUstep Framework dependency should be enough. We can get a list of all 
available frameworks (we know all dirs where frameworks are stored). In 
gnumakefile I should be able to write:

BUNDLE_NAME = MyBundle (similar for other targets)
MyBundle_REQUIRED_FRAMEWORKS = SomeFramework

And we should have:
   MyBundle_IS_OPTIONAL = YES
to ignore building the bundle when dependencies are not met, and:
   MyBundle_IS_OPTIONAL = NO
and when dependencies are not met, make will fail.

Instead of having such feature for all targets, it is sufficient to restrict it 
to subprojects (aggregate.make).

Some dependency list (as a cache) can be built at first make.

Just a brief idea. What do you think about that?

Stefan