Re: [linux-audio-user] regarding SCons - Linux-audio-user

6 May 2004

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