Compiling Programs for use with COMEDI

I had a question a few days ago about getting a runtime error from a COMEDI 
demo program I had compiled.  It turned out that I had better luck by using 
the Makefile provided (i.e. 'make tut1'), despite the documentation saying 
that I could just use gcc tut1.c -I../include -lcomedi -o tut1.

I am now trying to compile another file of my own creation, but the 
Makefile in the /demo directory is insanely convoluted.  Could someone 
please tell me what the typical library paths and compiler switches 
are?  Surely compiling and executing a simple program cannot be so hard in 
the Linux world!

Thanks,
-Jagan

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