Visual Studio Code - interconnected environment variables - visual-studio-code

Question

I am investigating how feasible would it be to switch to Visual Studio Code with larger and more complex projects in C++ with cmake and have hit the wall regarding environmental variables.
Some projects I'm dealing with require a complex structure of interconnected environmental variables, currently this is solved by mostly manual build in bash prompt
$ source envSetupFile
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. && make -j $(nproc)
where the envSetupFile contains a lot of different variables, most cases related to toolchain and some specific settings. When those are just plain strings, everything works fine, however there are many cases of variables depending on another one, for example something like (in bash)
export PATH=/opt/custom/lib: $PATH
export ROOT=/some/path
export BIN=$ROOT/bin
export LIB=$ROOT/lib
what I did
I installed the c/c++ extension package along with CMake and CMakeTools packages plus EditorConfig for VS Code
and added custom lines to the visual studio config in the workspace:
/projectpath/.vscode/cmake-kits.json where I set the environmental variables, but while I can set (and verify) directly defined work, any that requires value of another fails completely.
example:
"environmentVariables":{
"POTATO": "aaa",
"CARROT": "bbb",
"CABAGE": "${POTATO}/${CARROT}"
}
I'd expect that afterwards when running cmake which references ${CABAGE} would resolve it as aaa/bbb, but instead of it it takes them as string literals and produces ${POTATO}/${CARROT} as ouptut
I must confess I'm a bit surprised by no trace of such use case in documentation or examples I've seen so far. Perhaps someone could lend a hand? (I'm running VisualStudio Code Version: 1.36.1 on ubuntu 16.04)