Best way to extend C++ Project Make system

[davejohnston]

Hi,

I would like to extend the Make system used by C++ projects in Netbeans to suit my needs.

In addition to the compilation, I want to do two other things

1) copy certain header files, to a directory defined by me (this is for use in a larger build system)
2) run an application on some xml files to generate C++ code

Looking in the Makefile there is extension points i.e. pre-build, post-build etc. My issue is that I want to apply this behaviour to alot of projects.

I was wondering if anyone had done something similar and what approach they used?

Looking at the generated Makefile, I see that there is a OBJECTLIST, and targets have been generated for each file in that list.

I was wondering if it is possible to do something similar, for example if I had defined a HEADERS_TO_EXPORT list in the project Makefile, could I write some code that generates targets in the Debug/Release Mk files for each of those files.
I guess this would involve making changes to the Netbeans codebase itself.

I'd like to see examples if anyone has done something along those lines