Re: Scons vs BBv2 (was: Qt: moccing of cpp sources)

From: rwgk (rwgk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-14 06:56:42

David asked me off-line:

> I wonder if you'd like to tell us something about your reasons for
> choosing Scons instead of Boost.Build?

Some quick answers:

- I used BBv1 before using SCons. I found the bjam syntax very
difficult to understand. The bjam output seemed useless to me (many
"creating directory ..." and opaque "building ..." messages.

- I was very interested in SCons because it is written in a language
that I use all the time anyway, and that I really love. The day the
SCons "repository support" came out I started using SCons as the basis
for our build system. I took me only a couple of days to get started,
and over the years I spent only very little time maintaining the
SConscripts. It works great for us as is. The main problem are waits
for incremental builds (mainly due to the automatic scan for implicit
dependencies). I find it easy to work around this issue in practice
with cut-and-paste of the commands from the SCons output.

- A disadvantage of BBv1 (and BBv2?) is that bjam needs to be compiled
for each architecture. In contrast, since I need/have Python anyway,
SCons doesn't introduce additional executables to be build. To me this
is a major advantage; one fundamentally trivial but in practice often
aggravating problem less to worry about.

- Since I am quite happy with SCons it would take something vastly
better to motivate me to switch. The syntax would have to be at least
as nice and powerful as Python.

Cheers,
Ralf

--- In jamboost_at_[hidden], Vladimir Prus <ghost_at_c...> wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 September 2005 15:29, David Abrahams wrote:
> > Vladimir Prus <ghost_at_c...> writes:
> > >> > > But they are switching to Scons at the moment...
> > >> >
> > >> > Are they? I haven't see any news about this on KDE mailing lists.
> > >>
> > >> Well, according to my colleague this was discussed and probably
> > >> decided at the KDE Academy 2005 meeting in Malaga last week. He's
> > >> working on cervisia and said that the first Scons files appear in
> > >> the repository right now.
> > >
> > > Ehm... indeed. It looks like a couple of developers made SCons setup
> > > for KDE, and the question which system to use did not really arise
> > > (at least Boost.Build was not considered at all).
> >
> > I think we'd better think carefully about this. More and more
> > recently, I've been seeing people who are otherwise highly inclined
> > toward Boost using Scons instead of Boost.Build. We should be asking
> > why. What does Scons do better than Boost.Build? Is it more
> > reliable? Easier to understand? Better supported? etc.
> 
> Maybe, you can first ask those people. We can make guesses, but only
they know 
> for sure.
> 
> Personally, I suspect that Python might be a selling point.
> 
> - Volodya