Re: Arguments against switching to SCons?

My deep sympathies with you.. :)   Rest assured, there is light!


Thatcher Ulrich kirjoittaa torstaina, 4. maaliskuuta 2004, kello 17:02:

> 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).

SCons requires Python, it's a Python project (www.scons.org).

SCons/Lua can use either: a) scons, b) make/nmake, c) nothing (build 
all).

It used to be a Lua front-end but -for obvious reasons- gained ability 
to use make quite early on. As a developer, I still prefer to use 
'real' scons as the backbone, since it manages recompilation 
dependencies better (i.e. finds out if compiler options have changed, 
make just looks at time stamps).

If there's none whatsoever (but well, the compiler :) SCons/Lua will 
feed commands directly to the shell, without dependency checks.

btw, SCons version requirements for Python are very loose, something 
like 1.5 is enough and they intend to keep it so.

Downside: SCons/Lua only runs (is proven) on Win32, OSX, and Linux, but 
I wouldn't mind adding *BSD to the list. :)

>   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?

Bootstrapping is easy, I've made it in LuaX builds.  Simple makefile 
that builds lua + luac, then launches that for the 'real' build. I 
don't see this as a problem.  (but then again, I may not be entitled a 
vote here ;P )

>   And fancier features would require python anyway (not sure if that's
>   true)?  That's not the end of the world; just extra complication.

Fancier features can be done in Lua.

>   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.

SCons/Lua is not part of the SCons project. It's neither a spin-off, 
nor .. nothing. I haven't even looked at the source code, it's all from 
scratch.  Just the name resides, mainly because the _interface_ has 
been tried to be as close to real SCons as possible (for obvious 
reasons).

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

Teeser: I've got 'test [[ ... ]]' ability, which basically means 
autoconf-like things. You put C(++) code within the [[..]] and 
SCons/Lua tries to compile it. Easy to see if things exist, or not..

> * 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?

Since you already have Lua sources in LuaCheia, it won't change that 
much. 'make && make install' is all that's needed. No './configure' 
required. :)

-ak

> --
> Thatcher Ulrich
> http://tulrich.com
>
>
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