[Scons-users] Debugging a build project using SCons

[summerrain1 at gmx.de]

Hello folks,

first peek into this list, and been fiddling with a SCons build
structure for a somewhat complex project for a couple days.

Unfortunately I'm not going the route of learning this system by
starting with a small, simple project and making baby steps, but am in
the less than enviable position of being tasked to fix a build system
left by a "defected" colleague, which used to work, and now doesn't ;)

I have been trying to do things like add print or Debug.Trace statements
to SConscript files within the deep project hierarchy where I thought
illuminating when what happens may be promising.
But turns out there is no time correlation between when prints are put
on the console and when build steps actually happen, because the prints
are apparently all done when the system reads all the SConscript files.

Is there still a way to do "printf style debugging" this?
Is this even a good idea, or are there better ways to go about it?
I have seen one stackoverflow thread with suggestions of installing some
fancy IDE to debug the build scripts step-wise based on Python, but this
is a headless remote server & I can't do that.

I am having problems like the build failing due to some missing file,
but no indication in the console output as to why and where it may have
failed to get something.
Trying to get a picture of things just with grep is eating a lot of
time. Though I did fix one of these type of issues which turned out to
be hard-coded access tokens to download fixed archives of components,
which were expired & the build did not stop there despite those files
failing to download - intead things exploding later... (and it wasn't
even in SConscript or other clearly script type files, i.e. I'm grep'ing
all files...)


Regards