toughts on the :child command

I've been trying to work out how one might build a large project that uses
the :child command to combine several recipe files together.  The example
given in the tutorial involves too much boilerplace code for my liking,
and the logic just seems a little backwards to me.  Also I'm a little
constrained in how things work since I'm trying to replace Makefiles for
some complicated project and I want to keep the functionality as similar
as possible.

What I would *LIKE* to do is put a project-wide 'main.aap' in the root of
the project hierarchy and put a file to build libraries in the 'src/lib'
directory.  I want the build libraries to go into the 'lib/linux'
directory.

--- main.aap ---

Top = `os.getcwd()`
LibTop = $Top/lib/linux
INCLUDES = -I$Top/include
:child src/lib/child.aap

--- src/lib/child.aap ---

:dll $LibTop/foo : foo1.cc foo2.cc

--- end ---

Several things about this annoy me.  First, it seems like I shouldn't have
to set $Top; based on the name, I would have expected $TOPDIR to do this
for me, but instead it's just the opposite of what I want.  Ideally I'd
like $Top be expand to a relative path to the top-level directory, so the
AAP output isn't so verbose, but I can't figure out a clean way to do this. 
How about creating a new builtin variable that expands to "." in the
top-level file, "../.." in src/lib/child.app, etc.?  Such a variable
should probably also have a corresponding Python function just like $TOPDIR
has topdir().

My next problem is that the shared library built in src/lib/child.aap
doesn't get added to the dependencies of the 'all' target.  I could fix
this by writing my own "all" target like this:

  all : $LibTop/${DLLPRE}malloc${DLLSUF}

But that sure is ugly, and it would be a maintenence hassle when I'm
building a lot of programs or libraries in one project, as often happens
at my company.

--jw



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