Arguments against switching to SCons?

I have a lot of patience, but autotools is really stretching it.  Just
to review, here are the reasons I know of NOT to switch to SCons.  If
these reasons are invalid or obsolete or just not important, I could
be convinced to try switching.

* Requires Python.  The four CF hosts that we do nightly builds on all
  have python, although not all identical versions (I think the Alpha
  machine has 2.1, and the others have 2.2).

  Are there current luacheia users out there who can't/won't install
  python and SCons in order to build luacheia?  Juergen Fuhrman had
  expressed concern about this in the past, w/r/t TRU64 and/or some
  other systems he works on.  I was persuaded by this argument before,
  but my opinion has changed somewhat -- in over a year, we have not
  heard a peep from any luacheia users on platforms other than Linux,
  Windows, OSX, and OpenBSD.

  Personally, My ISP runs FreeBSD, so I care about that too, but lack
  of python is not a problem there.

* Asko's SCons/Lua seems cool, but it sounds like users (or build
  scripts we write) would have to bootstrap Lua in order to use it?
  And fancier features would require python anyway (not sure if that's
  true)?  That's not the end of the world; just extra complication.

  Also, in general I'm not a big fan of using a non-standard version
  of a project, when there is an actively maintained version with
  documentation, community etc.

* It's something new and involves a learning curve and effort to get
  it going.  What we have now kinda does work.

* What will the source tarball user experience be like?  I don't know
  if I've ever installed a source tarball that relied on SCons.  Can
  SCons smoothly support "./configure && make install" without a lot
  of work on our part to set it up?

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com


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