Scott Lystig Fritchie's SCons-Related Projects

SCons is a very nifty software building tool that I've developed a great liking for. Anyone who has read Peter Miller's paper, Recursive Make Considered Harmful, knows how difficult life can be using Make. If you've ever maintained a large software project with Make (hundreds or thousands of source files) and had to compile that source for several different operating systems and/or hardware platforms, then you know that you'd really, really like to use a better tool.

It's no surprise that there are a number of Open Source (as well as commercial) projects to be the world's best "Make killer". SCons, I believe, is a leading contender. See http://www.scons.org/ for full details about SCons.

Descriptions of the source distributions found here:

• Mylib is a collection of Python helper functions to make it even easier to write SCons configuration scripts for large software projects. It isn't as complete as the library I've created for my employer, but it should be a substantial help to SCons newcomers. (The documentation is good, but an example is worth a thousand words.)

  Features of Mylib include:

  • Use of SConscript config scripts in a manner familiar to recursive Make users: compile options changed in subdirectory "x/y" are automatically inherited by subdirectories "x/y/z1" and "x/y/z2" etc.
  • Demonstrates how to use the same config scripts to create several types of builds: with different optimization levels, debugging and tracing support, and cross-platform compilation.
  • Demonstrate invoking an external Make process to build a third-party library from scratch.
  • Demonstrate building a library whose member object files are located in different directories.
  • A demonstration of an IDL compiler "builder" for SCons.
  • Has already been used to demonstrate bugs in previous SCons releases.
  • Lots of comments!