Re: [jamboost] Re: [scons-devel] SCons BOF at O'Reilly OSCon 2003

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-06-23 19:32:46

At 02:47 PM 6/16/2003, David Abrahams wrote:

>OK, that's nice. A much more important issue for Boost would be "can
>a build system be packaged in such a way that someone installing (or
>building it from scratch) doesn't get the sense he's installing
>Python. Lord knows why; I guess some companies are regressive in
>that way.

The issue is the apparent length of the tool-chain the user has to deal 
with. If everything is all packaged up into a single distribution, and any 
optional portions automatically pick up any dependencies, then the user 
probably doesn't care. The modern cygwin installation process is an example 
of this; the user doesn't have to know about or otherwise deal with 
dependencies.

At the other extreme, there was a time when the installation of package A 
often failed inexplicably, and only after much effort could the user 
determine that package B had to be downloaded and installed first. Then it 
would turn out that B had a dependency on C, and C was no longer available. 
A nightmare.

>Honestly, I'm not sure it's so important: if we could just provide
>prebuilt executables for a few major platforms I bet we could get
>away with telling everyone else to install Python.

Prebuilt executables are immensely easier to use, that's for sure.

--Beman