I agree with Laura that you should get specific about what your actual needs are so we can tackle a real problem and hopefully provide some real answers.

Other than that, though, I can give you my standard Jam advise:

If it's gotten overly complicated, you're doing it wrong.

One of the weird things about Jam is that, initially, it looks completely alien, which makes you think it's really complicated. So you end up complicating things yourself when you first try to use it, when in fact, you should be doing just the opposite: simplifying things as much as possible. Jam wants you to do that -- it just doesn't look like it does.

I even fell into that trap when I first started using it again, after having been away from it for awhile (being stuck in the goofy world of gmake). I came up with this incredible gobbledyguk to get a static and shared library from the same source, and of course, it still wasn't working right. Then I finally got sane, said "What am I doing??", and threw it all out. Now my rules to do that are short and sweet and work just fine. Because that's what Jam wants, it's how it works best -- which is what makes it so nice to use, once you get back into it and remember that.

So that's the best general advice I can give you: keep it simple, it's the way Jam wants it.

And the best way to really get that is the same as getting anything: start with actual, fairly straightforward problems, then work your way up to the more complex ones.

Oh yeah -- and run it with debug a few times, just to see what it's really doing, if that's the sort of thing that helps you (it does me).

Diane (dia...@whistle.com)