On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:

: > However, I'm going to revisit the possibility as a new variable substitution
: > modifier in make(1) (that will open("."), go to the variable's corresponding
: > objdir, getcwd(), then fchdir() back to the old dir).
:
: Slight correction, chdir("other_srcdir"), work out objdir and return.
: Should be easy enough to do.  Just lift the existing code that works
: out objdir and put it in a function [...]

Right, exactly.

: If we are going to add any new modifiers I think we should seriously
: consider multiple char modifier names. Like make's -d command line
: option.  Eg. the assignment modifiers ::= ::!= ::+= ::?= all burn only
: a single option char ':'.

Hm.  I've been thinking about this.  How about a concept of `named transform
functions', allowing more than just one character?  For instance, for the
objdir transform, you might have

LIBBFD=		${TOP}/lib/libbfd
LDFLAGS+=	-L${LIBBFD:>SRCOBJ}

and every word in ${LIBBFD} (here, only one) is put through the
srcdir->objdir transform function, named SRCOBJ.  More transforms could
easily be added; in fact, you could represent almost all single-character
operators in this form if desired.

A punctuation character is the easiest (and probably least conflicting)
choice for this kind of substitution operator.  All of !, ?, >, %, &, and *
come to mind as possible such operator characters; I'm not sure which are
already in use on other bmake derivatives.

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