[linux-audio-user] regarding SCons

[Dave Phillips]

Hi Steven:

  Forgive me for this late reply, I was in Karlsruhe when your message 
arrived.

  For the most part I had already discovered the answers to my original 
queries, but read on... ;-)

>As Juan indicated, this behavior is supported by run "scons -c".
>A number of other software packages that are beginning to use SCons set
>up an alias in their SConscript files so you can still type "scons clean"
>at the command line.
>
That would be good. We autotoolers are quite familiar with the 'make; 
make install; make clean' process...

>>    3. No man pages, that sucks on a UNIX/Linux platform. The GNU 
>>autotools have them, SCons should have them too.
>>    
>>
>
>How are you installing SCons?  We do have a very thorough man page, but
>it sounds like you've stumbled into a hole in the process that prevents
>it from being installed.  Can you help me understand what it is so we
>can fix it?  Is this from one of the SCons packages you downloaded, or
>is it from the scons/ or scons-local/ package shipped internally with
>CT or CSound?
>
This is an odd one. Apparently the install step is not installing the 
man page by default (someone else mentioned that they manually placed it 
in /usr/local/man). I downloaded, built, and installed the SCons package 
available from the home site, and I *think* I followed the instructions 
exactly. At any rate, SCons itself works perfectly. :)

>>    4. No 'scons uninstall' ?? Again, if I'm missing it, please inform 
>>me how it's invoked.
>>    
>>
>
>As Juan indicated, this is something the SConscript writer has to supply.
>
I guess that's okay. I'd be happy if it were de rigeur for autotools too...

>>  CT and Csound are now the only two apps on my system that use SCons. 
>>The maintainers of Csound couldn't make the autotools work for 
>>themselves, so now you must add downloading and installing SCons (and an 
>>up-to-date Python)
>>    
>>
>
>SCons itself is very intentionally written to run on an old Python version
>(1.5.2) so you don't have to install an up-to-date Python to use it.
>CT and Csound may require later versions of Python to handle Python 2.x
>code they've put in their SConscript files, though.
>
Mea culpa, sorry about that. Now it needs to become a de facto component 
in all significant distros.

>Although SCons has been around a while now, it's only just now beginning
>to reach the sort of critical mass that makes all of the distro owners
>sit up and take notice.  The more voices that request it of other distros
>(such as RH), the easier this will get...
>
>In the meantime, we're trying hard to continue to make SCons as easy as
>possible for both software developers and end users to use, so I'm very
>glad to receive the feedback.  Thanks for posting your questions/comments,
>and if there are other ways SCons can be improved to make this sort of
>transition a little easier, please don't hesitate to let me know.
>
Thanks, Steven. Your response is much appreciated, and I'll be sure to 
contact the SCons team if/when I run into any major difficulties.

Best regards,

Dave Phillips