Re: custom makefiles for apps

[Nelson Minar]

First off - there's no rule that says you have to use our Makefiles at
all for your apps. I hope the Makefiles provided save trouble for
simple things, but if they get in the way feel free to use your own
structure. Official Swarm libs need to conform to certain (changing)
standards, but your own apps are up to you. I suggest at least using
Makefile.conf to avoid configuration headaches.

>I'd like to have a particular app include some files not
>in the directory I am making it in, and I'd
>like to link in my own lib from another another dir, too.
>but I don't want all apps (or swarm itself) to 
>know about thse, so I don't want to change the Makefile.conf.

If by "include some files" you mean link in more .o files, I think
make will do the right thing if you just add something like
"../foo/bar.o" to the OBJECTS macro, but I haven't tried it.

Linking in your own libs is a bit trickier. EXTRALDFLAGS and OTHERLIBS
are obvious macros to override, but they might not go in the exact
order you need. If that doesn't work you could locally override LIBS
itself (the full list of libs to link), or even change the rule for
make $(APPLICATION).

I'm still hoping for an inspiration to allow the user to easily choose
which Swarm libraries to link in, without overwhelming novices with
having to know all the interdependencies of our libraries.

Sorry this is such a mess. make drives me crazy, it's a really
incalcitrant piece of software. I've looked around for a decent make
replacement but haven't found anything good. I've even thought about
trying to write my own Perl libraries to do make-like stuff but allow
you to write full Perl scripts to build programs. But Swarm is already
using enough nonstandard software :-)