[Scons-users] Substfile / Textfile builders

[Mats Wichmann]

This topic is from https://github.com/SCons/scons/issues/3147

Bill suggested it ought to move here for a while, I'm following up to
try to move it forward, since the issue has sat for a few months now.

substfile and textfile have to be imported explicity (tools=[...])

The issue filer suggests they should be part of default.

The default comes from the list GlobalDefaultBuilders in
Scripts/__init__.py.  The docs aren't really clear on whether a given
builder is part of the default or needs to be listed. The manpage entry
contains a substfile example which hints it's not default, though it
does not say anything explicitly:

  env = Environment(tools = ['default', 'textfile'])

  env['prefix'] = '/usr/bin'
  script_dict = {'@prefix@': '/bin', '@exec_prefix@': '$prefix'}
  env.Substfile('script.in', SUBST_DICT = script_dict)
  ...

The textfile example, on the other hand, does not show the creation of
the environment, just dives right in:

  # builds/writes foo.txt
  env.Textfile(target = 'foo.txt', source = ['Goethe', 42, 'Schiller'])
  ...

So I guess there are three questions here:

(a) should substfile and testfile be part of the default?
(b) is there any guideline for default/not-default within scons?
(c) can we come up with wording for the manpage to indicate whether a
builder is default or needs to be specified? or is that too fragile
since it has to be kept up to date manually at the moment?