Re: SCons

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 02:03:48AM -0600, Nicholas Steinberg wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 02:34:10 -0500, Matthew A. Nicholson
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I was wondering if you all ever considered SCons (www.scons.org) as
> > a build system. I am willing to conver y-windows over.
> 
> If Y becomes popular, this could be a good oportunity to get a Make
> alternative's foot in the door. Another idea might be Apache's Ant (
> http://ant.apache.org/ ).

It could be. But consider that it also could be very negative on Y. The
point is that make is almost ubiquitous and scons and ant are not. And
even if the ``local make'' doesn't support all features the build system
uses (those needs can generally be reduced so that various makes, such as
sysv's make, pmake and gmake, can all use the same makefiles), gmake is
by now portable enough to be installable if a local make doesn't do.

You want Y to be easily made everywhere, not confined to whatever
environment the developers like to install. So you want to _reduce_
dependencies to the minimum possible without impeding development. If
gmake fills the need, there is no reason to put something else in, even
if that is theoretically better.


> I guess this could be seen as a fight
> between Python (SCons) and Java (Ant). We should go with whatever is
> most practical (even Make, if necessary), but, in the fight between
> Python and Java, ignoring all other factors, a) it's possible more
> Linux users have Python installed than Java, and b) Python is OSS/FS,
> and Java isn't.

And Y is built with neither java nor python. Shall we stick to make?

This is not to put anyone off toying with whatever toys they like
to play with. This is merely to keep this toy from depending on
other toys that may or may not be installed everywhere. There
is practically no gcc installation without a gmake, whereas gcc
bears no relation to java or python. Even if you happen to run
$distro_that_installs_python_by_default. Same goes for java.


-- 
  j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .