Meanwhile I read Scons Documentation.
Am Samstag, den 02.12.2017, 10:05 +0200 schrieb Damjan Jovanovic:
Hi
After days of failing to add a few new simple features to gbuild,
I've now
reached my limits, and have begun experimenting with the SCons
build
system
instead.
It's starting to work. Having ported some of gbuild.mk [1],
LinkTarget.mk
and
platform/freebsd.mk [2] to SCons, as well as a module's local
gbuild
files, I
can now compile files and (badly) link them into libraries, and
clean
the
build.
SCons is an advanced next-generation build system like gbuild,
with
high
level declarative syntax in Python, support for multiple modules
that
build
in parallel, header dependencies, file change detection through
MD5
sums of
contents instead of timestamps so rebuilds are faster, etc. It
builds
C,
C++, Objective C, Java, Fortran, D, the sorely necessary Flex and
Yacc that
gbuild doesn't support. It supports tons of platforms and
compilers,
including OS/2. It's maintainable and usable, can print debugging
info such
as dependency trees, and is generally pleasant to work with.
We've
discussed it before on this list, but I never got to trying it
until
now.
Virtually everything gbuild does, is already done by SCons, and
often
done
much better. The syntax for SCons files is similar/related to
gbuild's
syntax, so an automated conversion from gbuild to SCons might
even be
possible.
So far, I have defines, includes and C[XX]FLAGS working. I've
structured it
a bit better, with platform-specific files in classes that only
provide
variables to slot in higher up, instead of one giant set of
globally
mutable global variables like in gbuild. Linking still needs a
bit of
work.
Windows is next on the list, as Cygwin will be the ultimate test
of
whether
we can use it.
I am very hopeful. SCons has a long history and is used by other
projects,
while only OO.o derivatives use gbuild. It's well documented. It
supports
features we need which gbuild doesn't, like library version names
and
flex/yacc. It's supposed to work on Windows, both inside and
outside
of
Cygwin and could help us build without Cygwin some day. It
supports
many
versions of Visual Studio and could help us in upgrading to a new
one. We
will need to add custom builders to SCons for our custom file
formats
like
IDL, but it's just Python, not my favorite language but
infinitely
better
than GNU make.
It would help if someone could review my changes, as I am not
very
familiar
with Python and there might be better ways to write some of the
code.
I'll
post a patch for review after some further development.
Thank you
Damjan
