Rewrite to not use make

[PeterJohnson]

The overall approach here is clunky. Make isn't really the right tool, as it's very difficult to do smart things like check for existence of data trees, remote package installs, etc. Maybe this would be better implemented as a (set of?) Python scripts?

[virtuald]

Not a bad idea.

[virtuald]

Looking at what NI does, they use bitbake and a bunch of tools from openembedded, all using cross-compilers. That approach seems to work for them, why not do it that way?

[PeterJohnson]

I've found that cross-compilers don't always work too well and tend to be a lot more fragile in setup. Some things in particular like ATLAS can't be cross-compiled. It's always better to build native if that's an option.