[Scons-users] SCons popularity

[Evan Driscoll]

On 6/4/2015 1:40 PM, Paweł Tomulik wrote:
> Consider these two worlds: developers and package maintainers. If you
> give an automake-based project to a Debian package maintainer, (s)he'll
> just grab it and make a package, because there is a "standard interface"
> found in most automake-based project that is used (without much effort)
> by package maintainers. If you give the same person a SCons-based
> project, he'll probably fail at first place or at least spend much time
> digging through the project-specific documentation, because it's not
> known a priori how to build and preinstall (certain parts of) this
> particular project to appropriate place(s). Often, there is simply no
> such way.

For what it's worth, it's not just package maintainers. My two cents:

I acted in a partial (and extremely occasional) role as a sysadmin for a 
while, installing packages to a network location so that they were 
easily available across the network. Because they were being installed 
to a non-standard location, we built almost all packages we installed by 
hand. (The usual Linuxy way of making a package is to embed paths to 
resources, rpaths, etc. in executables, so for many packages you can't 
just take a pre-built one and put it at a different location.)

And as much as I don't ever want to work with autotools, it's relative 
inflexibility with regard to cross-platform builds (compared to 
something like SCons), and some more minor complaints about it from a 
end-user's perspective (i.e. someone building), the installation of 
autotools packages was almost always easy (except for resolving 
dependences). I know I can configure with 
--prefix=/the-network-drive/this-package-1.23/ and it will almost 
certainly install to that location. If it needs a library, you can 
almost certainly pass --with-libawesome=/path-to-libawesome.

Non-autotools packages almost always took longer to install. I don't 
think I ever installed an SCons package in the course of this (I do use 
it for most of my own stuff), but I did encounter a number of other 
systems, most commonly plain-Make. Like the complaint on the Gentoo page 
says, you always have to look around for a while to figure out how to do 
anything besides "build with default settings", which are never 
suitable. The only thing that comes close to the autotools' standardness 
were CMake builds; I got pretty good at going through those quickly.

Evan