[Scons-users] Interactive Mode on Windows

[mg at ncp-e.com]

Hi Dirk,

> Can you tell us which SCons version you're using currently?

it's version 2.3.6. We've recently upgraded from 2.3.0 to this version
for support of visual studio 2015 on Windows.

> Not directly. Would you be able to bisect this problem, in order to
> find out which commit (or at least which release version) introduced
> the error?

For starters I've tested the released versions. The result is the
following:

version 2.3.0: is working stable

version 2.3.1 - 2.3.3: couldn't really test them, because these versions
show a different behaviour. Although a target failed to build (due to a
regular compiler error) SCons refuses to retry building it a second
time, acting as if the target was complete, which it isn't.

version 2.3.4: exhibits the behaviour described originally. The first
one or two build attempts work as expected and then the source file name
isn't passed any more to the compiler command line.

I'm not sure if a more detailed bisection using Mercurial makes sense
given that 2.3.1 - 2.3.3 can't be tested for the problem. I could try
looking between 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 for finding the change that triggers
the change in behaviour.

> Having done a fair amount of profilings and performance measurements
> of the SCons core, I find it hard to believe that your build is so
> slow that you see yourself being "forced" to use the interactive mode.

Don't get me wrong on this. I'm not saying that Scons is inefficient.

It's just a psychological thing. Many of my co-developers used simpler
build systems in the past. These build systems didn't even cover
complete projects but only single components (like a single library or
executable). So they hit the build button in their GUI and it starts
compiling immediately.

That is what they compare SCons against. The interactive mode offers a
good point in this discussion.

> When you mention "long" init times, how much seconds are we talking
> about for a "null build" (meaning everything is up-to-date)? And how
> big in C/CPP files is your code base?

Currently it takes about 14 seconds for the "null build". This covers
our complete code base with (rougly) 2.300 headers, 2.000 source files
and up to 5.000 headers from third party packages.

We have possibilities to further reduce this time by limiting SCons to
certain projects only so we get down to 6 to 9 seconds depending on the
configuration.

> Just as a kind of last resort: accidentally I'm in Nuremberg quite
> often during the weekends (Saturday+Sunday), so if you think a 
> get-together would be a good idea, we could talk and try to arrange
> things.

Thanks that's a noble offer. I'm much interested personally. Just it
feels somewhat strange to get free consulting like this and I don't know
if I can get my management to bring up a decent donation for the SCons
project ...

Thanks for your help so far!

Matthias
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