Context: I'm currently experimenting with building our depends with CMake when possible as part of our future transition to CMake. Specifically zmq, libevent, libnatpmp, and miniupnpc all have existing CMake buildsystems. Building them with CMake will allow us to drop several deps that we currently have (autoconf, automake, pkg-config, etc) which would be unfortunate to carry over after the switch-over.
But that's not relevant for this PR. This is just a very simple change that makes the above work easier to experiment with as it adds a needed feature for CMake packages. It's a no-op for the current builds.
From commit description:
This will allow us to use the existing machinery for filtering by arch, os, debug/release, etc.
For example, the following becomes possible for libevent when building with CMake:
$(package)_config_opts_release=-DEVENT__DISABLE_DEBUG_MODE
Now the define is only set when not building depends with DEBUG=1