[Scons-users] About contributing to your project

[Mats Wichmann]

On 11/8/22 17:18, Michael Potter wrote:
> "they are looking at the manpage and the users guide would be a better"
> 
> That is ringing a bell.
> 
> Maybe the solution is to cross link them?

Theoretically speaking, yes. It's in practice a little tricky because 
(a) toolchain limitations and (b) locality (the "current" web copy of 
the user guide can link to the current manpage, but then what happens 
when you do the generation to actual man format for Linux distros - i.e. 
it's not an html page, or when you try to look at these after a local 
build - both of those illustrating that you can't count on there to be a 
webserver to always find things for you)

> I will probably work on scons again sometime in the spring of 2023.   I 
> am trying to add COBOL support.
> 
> There is a group trying to add COBOL as a first class language in the 
> gcc tool chain and this would be my contribution.  (note, the new gCOBOL 
> <> GnuCOBOL.   they are different products.  GnuCOBOL is a transpiler 
> (COBOL -> C).

That shouldn't be terribly hard.  If it fits in the GNU toolchain, it 
should be fairly workable. The challenge will be working out 
dependencies - the "scanner" and perhaps the "emitter".  I believe 
dependencies are not entirely easy to work out in modern COBOL - some of 
the new developments in Fortran and C++ (submodules for the former, 
modules for the latter) give a hint of how tricky it can be to determine 
things from the source files.  You should be able to get some guidance 
on this when you're ready...