Re: [scons-devel] auto-configuration plans

>> This is a really good point. Bram could just take SConf as it is today, 
>> and write a thin wrapper to adapt it to AAP (i.e. take the construction 
>> environment variables and copy them to AAP variable space), and be done 
>> with it.
>
> And include the whole of SCons inside Aap?  Not a good idea!  It's like
> getting a whole toolchest when you only need a screwdriver.  I don't
> want to have Aap depend on the whole of SCons.

I'm not so sure, if you just need a screwdriver. To provide an autoconf- 
feature, which is user friendly and mighty enough, you'll also need a 
hammer and much glue :-) Configuration is not that easy!

Of course i can understand your point, but if you'd like to build a 
complete, standalone replacement of autoconf including custom tests, you'll 
probably end up with re-implementing much of the code we already have in 
scons (or somehing similar).

Ok, now i'll end the polemical part :-) and state some practical problems 
which must be solved, before SConf can move outside of SCons.

1. SCons went beta recently, so we should try hard to fix the API including 
the API to the SConf subsystem. The affected API is the Configure - call, 
but also the Custom-Test stuff.

2. It's relatively easy to implement TryCompile, TryLink and TryRun "build- 
system-independent", but it's absolutely non-obvious, how to implement 
TryAction and how to manage the environment changes. I believe that the 
first feature is very useful for writing custom checks, and the second 
feature is essential. You should remember, that a SCons environment is more 
than a dict mapping strings to strings (we also have variables mapping to 
python functions ...)

3. Caching the checks is really essential for a usable autoconf 
replacement. I doubt, that a completely non-caching autoconf version would 
be accepted by users. Though not perfect yet, the current caching mechanism 
of scons is rather good, and i wouldn't like to see this good thing 
dying...

Christoph


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