Rework the MicropolisCore build system

The makefiles are old and out of date. 
The build system needs to be modernized and rationalized.

It should support multiple platforms (Linux and MacOS -- but not Windows
since that's build with Visual Studio). 

It might be nice to put the code into XCode on the Mac, but right now it's
simply compiled with the same makesfiles that Linux uses. 

It should probably use the Python extension setup.py system to compile and
install Python extensions (or at least I think it should -- there may be
reasons to do it differently). 

There should be a way to build it without SWIG being installed. So "make
clean" should not delete the files generated by SWIG, but there can be an
option or another "cleanswig" target that also cleans out the SWIG stuff to
force it to be regenerated. 
Note that the SWIG generated files are checked into subversion, to make it
possible for people who don't have SWIG installed to build the code.
SWIG is only required if you're actually changing the interfaces it's
wrapping. 

There should be a way to package and install an application and a
distribution file or installer on each of the platforms supported (Linux,
MacOS, Windows). 

There is not currently any special support for packaging MicropolisCore as
an OLPC activity (that should be another issue), but when there is, the
makefiles should be able to generate it, and package a distribution file.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by simhac...@gmail.com on 1 Apr 2008 at 9:31

chrismessina / micropolis

Rework the MicropolisCore build system #6