Multiple subdirectories/sub-builds

[Jim Riggs]

I am working on a new port that has several "sub-builds."  That is, the distfile has several subdirectories, each with its own configure/make/install.  Are there any best practices or suggestions for dealing with this scenario?  I didn't find anything in the handbook, and list searches didn't turn up anything (though I don't know what exactly to search for).

I know that I could do multiple slave ports and set WRKSRC for each of them, but I don't really want to clutter up ports/packages with a bunch of new slave ports which really don't apply standalone.

I suppose I could define do-(configure|build|install) to do configure, make, make install, respectively, in each of the subdirs.  This way, though, I would be losing a lot of the stuff that ports does for free (configure args, make args, etc.) unless I reproduce parts of bsd.port.mk.

Is there another way to do this gracefully?  Am I missing something obvious?  Any suggestions or ideas?