I spent most of a day beating my head against the bizarre the SPICE build
script was able to run only once; after that, it blew up early with make
claiming not to be able to find the file "./makedefs" which was plainly in
evidence.  The short description of the problem:  the SPICE build process
puts its objects in an "obj" directory...

Would there be any way to defeat make's obj/ behavior (for the benefit of
large ugly systems that have their own way of doing things)?