3 Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003 Steven Knight
5 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
6 a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
7 "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
8 without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
9 distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
10 permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
11 the following conditions:
13 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
14 in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
16 THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
17 KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
18 WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
19 NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
20 LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
21 OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
22 WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
28 Most of the ideas in &SCons; originate with &Cons;, a Perl-based
29 software construction utility that has been in use by a small but
30 growing community since its development by Bob Sidebotham at FORE
31 Systems in 1996. The &Cons; copyright was transferred in 2000 from
32 Marconi (who purchased FORE Systems) to the Free Software Foundation.
33 I've been a principal implementer and maintainer of &Cons; for several
40 &Cons; was originally designed to handle complicated software build
41 problems (multiple directories, variant builds) while keeping the
42 input files simple and maintainable. The general philosophy is that
43 the build tool should ``do the right thing'' with minimal input
44 from an unsophisticated user, while still providing a rich set of
45 underlying functionality for more complicated software construction
46 tasks needed by experts.
52 In 2000, the Software Carpentry sought entries in a contest for a
53 new, Python-based build tool that would provide an improvement
54 over Make for physical scientists and other non-programmers
55 struggling to use their computers more effectively. Prior to that,
56 the idea of combining the superior build architecture of &Cons;
57 with the easier syntax of Python had come up several times on
58 the <literal>cons-discuss</literal> mailing list. The Software
59 Carpentry contest provided the right motivation to spend some
60 actual time working on a design document.
66 After two rounds of competition, the submitted design, named
67 <application>ScCons</application>, won the competition. Software
68 Carpentry, however, did not immediately fund implementation of the
69 build tool, instead contracting for additional, more detailed draft(s)
70 of the design document. This proved to be not as strong motivation as
71 actual coding, and after several months of inactivity, I essentially
72 resigned from the Software Carpentry effort in early 2001 to start
73 working on the tool independently.
79 After half a year of prototyping some of the important infrastructure,
80 I accumulated enough code to take the project public at SourceForge,
81 renaming it &SCons; to distinguish it slightly from the version of the
82 design that won the Software Carpentry contest while still honoring
83 its roots there and in the original &Cons; utility. And also because
84 it would be a teensy bit easier to type.