Creating "Additional" makefiles

[Stephen Brandon]

Hi,

I'm getting to the stage with SndKit and MusicKit that each and every 
project based on these kits need a number of GNUmakefile customisations.

Eg all SndKit programs need -lshout -lmp3lib, unless the target platform is 
MINGW32; and at present I conditionally compile SndView.m into the SndKit 
ONLY on non-win32 platforms (it's the only AppKit subclass, and there are 
problems getting AppKit subclasses to be recognised at runtime on 
GNUstep/Win32).

I think it's time I made a "sndkit.make" and "mkperformsndmidi.make" and put 
them into Makefiles/Additional/ so that I don't need to specify these things 
in projects' individual makefiles. I'm also starting to work on an autoconfig 
setup that will determine certain characteristics of the host(/target?) 
environment and write these additional makefiles accordingly.

Is there somewhere that documents what to put in the Additional makefiles and 
how to use them? What I want to do is to be able to automatically identify 
which of the frameworks/libraries are being used (MKPerformSndMIDI, SndKit, 
MKDSP, MusicKit) and add -l and -D flags accordingly.

I suppose one way to do this would be to write a couple of new major 
makefiles such as SndKit_tool.make, MusicKit_tool.make, SndKit_app.make etc 
etc, but it sounds like overkill to me. It would be easier to simply ask 
MK/SK authors to add a particular variable in their makefiles to define 
whether the project uses only MKPerformSndMIDI, that + SndKit, all that + 
MusicKit, or all that + MKDSP (stack of dependant frameworks/libraries), then 
the Additional/*.make files could pick this up and deal with it accordingly.

How does that sound, from an elegance/correctness point of view? Are there 
other more official ways of achieving what I'm trying to do?

NOTE: although I'd love to be able to avoid using autoconf/configure to set 
up some of these things, the fact that developers and users are going to have 
to have certain 3rd party libraries installed means that we've got to be able 
to ensure that they're there, and configure accordingly. If anyone has got 
any suggestions to get around this, I'd be happy to listen.

Cheers,
Stephen Brandon
stephen@brandonitconsulting.co.uk