> I know scons is not perfect right now, but I do not expect > anyone who does not like it to use it either. Why cannot Lars and > other autotools fans just *ignore* the scons stuff?
Because when someone tries to build with scons, and they have a problem, they are going to send an email to lyx-devel about it. If you don't have time to maintain a branch with the scons stuff in, then you can't possibly have time to handle all complaints about it either.
Just reply: that is not supported. But I would imagine more like: autoconf is kind of troublesome under windows, please try scons first. Scons is already working smoothly under linux (our main user base), subject to more testing. Under windows, it is *already* easier than the "go to wiki, read the 2000 lines intruction, put this file under /usr/lic/qt3/blah get this blah.sh file and run blah". The complications are mostly handled. The main problem with scons now is that it does not do scons install yet. It is not that I can not do it (scons is very flexible and there are sample code everywhere), but I would like to wait for the standardization of this feature.
Of course nobody's objecting in principle to making life easier for windows developers. But maintaining two build systems is a significant decision, and unless you're going to maintain it yourself, perhaps you should have asked the people who would end up doing so.
I have said it before again and again: at this stage, I, and developers who are intereated in making their life easier, will maintain and use it. Other people, *please* stay with autotools.
By the way, I hate autotools. I hate them because they're too complicated. Having scons+autotools is even more complicated. Autotools needs a replacement, not anything extra.
A replacement will never happen without a trunk appearance of another build system.
in the backend need multiple implementations in the frontend. With scons+autotools, changes in the build logic need multiple changes in the build tools.
We will update scons by ourselves, we know that will be easy. We have promised to update Makefile.am if we know how to do it. What else you are expecting from us?
So let's have a branch, and let's have a serious look at scons as a potential replacement for autotools.
*nix people are quite comfortable with autotools, and they do not care about windows, although they advertise the 'universal portability' of autotools. Bo
