I currently have a project at my hand that I'll leave soon (PhD work) and should be left in an understandable form since it is likely to be taken up, though it is not known yet by whom and when.
Therefore, I'd like to leave at least some documentation how it is built. The project consists of 7 packages, each of which is an independent source code package whose compilation only depends on libraries and headers from other packages. The whole build process revolves around open source standards, i.e. each project is built by autoconf and automake, is Debian-ized and the interpackage dependencies are declared in the Debian packages and checked in configure scripts.
However, this feels like a quite specific way of specifying a quite general problem. It is likely that the next maintainer would want to build the software with a Windows GUI thingy that doesn't know anything about autoconf or Debian. I'd like to leave more rigid documentation in this case than a bunch of comments in the assorted INSTALL files and the Build-Depends/Depends declarations in the Debian files.
Is there any toolchain-agnostic established language or standard to document packaging and build order? Bonus points if the actual build system specifications (like Debian Build-Depends) could be generated from that.