Track: BOF
Date: Thursday, July 10
Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Columbia
Moderated by: Steven Knight, Project Leader, SCons Project
SCons is a next-generation Open Source build tool whose design won the Software Carpentry build tool competition in August 2000. This BOF will cover what's in the most recent SCons release(s), discuss future directions for SCons, and get input from the SCons user community about development priorities.
About SCons:
SCons was designed from the ground up to solve the real-world problems of complicated, cross-platform software builds. SCons has now reached full maturity after a long alpha- and beta-test cycle, and is developed with a rigorous regression-testing methodology to guarantee stable builds.
SCons allows you to use a real scripting language (Python) to solve build problems; configuration files are actually scripts that call build-engine methods to establish dependencies and build rules. SCons features a modular build-engine design that can be embedded in other software, and which is easily extensible.
SCons uses MD5 signatures of file contents to reliably detect
source-code changes; traditional timestamps can be used as an
alternative. SCons automatically scans for #include lines and other internally-defined dependencies, eliminating the need for static dependency lists or "make depend" build steps. SCons gets all of the uild dependencies right, without recursion or multiple build passes, by maintaining a global view of all dependencies in a tree.
SCons supports sharing generated files between developer builds
(reducing build times), and can transparently fetch files as needed from central source code or build repositories. SCons has improved support for parallel (-j) builds, keeping N jobs running simultaneously regardless of directory structure.
