>> BTW, anyone heard of ODE (OSF Dev Env)?  According to one of my 
>> collegues here the pmake in ODE has a couple of _very_ cool
>> features.  I plan on adding them to our make and/or my portable

>Yup.  I evaluated it briefly before CVS-II came along (it is very cool
>but it wasn't quite what I wanted at the time).

Thanks for the URL's. Yes the full ODE thing is a lot to swallow
but there are features in ODE's make that would be very handy:

:@<tvar>@<string>@

which causes tvar to take on the value of each word in the variable and 
then evaluate string - which presumably uses tvar in a meaningful way.
This is a neat alternative to .for loops

:D<foo>
:U<foo>
use foo as value if variable is defined or undefined.  We already have a
:?<defined>:<undefined> but ${FOO:U${BAR}} is quite handy - for setting up
per file compile options etc.

There are a few more.

--sjg