[Scons-dev] Re Install information update[was Re: SCons doesn't bootstrap without libxml2]

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2014-02-18 at 23:19 +0300, anatoly techtonik wrote:
[…]

> My opinion is that by adding additional dependencies to run the SCons

> without errors from a fresh checkout we are significantly increasing

> contribution

> barrier and discouraging people from participating.


I agree that this might put off people interested in helping to develop
SCons. However this has nothing to do with people taking up SCons for
production builds.


> People need to checkout and run to see the power of SCons. Not read,

> checkout, install, setup, run cycle. Something like this.


Again for potential contributors to the project yes, but not for take up
and traction.

The SCons install page talks about Fedora first, Debian second (and who
uses apt-get when aptitude is available?) and Windows as a footnote,
32bit Windows at that.

This page clearly needs to emphasize 64-bit in this day and age, Windows
and OSX since they are the hard ones. Ubuntu, Mint, RHEL, CentOS all
need to get into the role call.

We should also be thinking about Scons in Eclipse (i.e. advertise
SConsolidator and get equivalents for IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, etc.
Perhaps most importantly, most commercial C and C++ development happens
in Visual Studio, so why aren't we plugging SCons in the MSBuild space?

Well from a personal perspective, I don't give a sh&t about Windows, I
never use it, so I have no motivation to do anything along the lines I
propose. I am just setting out observations.

A few more observations whilst I am at it: D, Go, the whole JVM-verse
have their own build frameworks and do not use SCons and are less and
less likely to each day. Indeed Gradle is now getting traction as the C
++ build tool to replace Make for those doing C++ with some Java or vice
versa.

In this light I have dropped the Go build for SCons from maintenance,
and am not doing much with the D tooling until D has full support for
shared libraries. The current D tooling is working fine and needs
merging into master for 2.4.0. However I am not going to propose a merge
until someone or some CI is able to tell me the whole thing isn't
entirely borked on Windows. I test on Debian Fedora and OSX and it is
fine.

So if we are talking about support for development, CI please, for pull
requests.

SCons is my "go to" tool for LaTeX, C and C++, but sadly most people end
up using CMake. Poor them.


-- 
Russel.
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