One thing that I have done in build scripts sometimes is read
   /etc/mk.conf with a shell script to extract env. variables for
   make.  Could you do something like this?  I.e., as far as make
   is concerned, it's an environment variable, but as far as the
   operator is concerned, it's set in /etc/mk.conf (or $(BUILDROOT)/mk.conf?).


my /etc/mk.conf is a fairly heavily-using makefile, and will just cause
shell errors if it tries to read it.  something like this might work:


printf "echovar:; @echo ${VARIABLE}\n" | make -f - -f ${MAKECONF} echovar


which will print the value of ${VARIABLE} from ${MAKECONF}.  expand this
to whatever you need.  (i often use the above on the command line to
work out what a particularly variable is being set to.)


.mrg.