# Copyright (c) 2001, 2002 Steven Knight # __FILE__ __REVISION__ __DATE__ __DEVELOPER__ SCons - a software construction tool Release Notes This is an alpha release of SCons, a tool for building software (and other files). SCons is implemented in Python, and its "configuration files" are actually Python scripts, allowing you to use the full power of a real scripting language to solve build problems. You do not, however, need to know Python to use SCons effectively. So that everyone using SCons can help each other learn how to use it more effectively, please sign up for the scons-users mailing list at: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scons-users RELEASE 0.10 - XXX This is the tenth alpha release of SCons. Please consult the CHANGES.txt file for a list of specific changes since last release. Please note the following important changes since release 0.09: - The Scanner interface has been changed to make it easier to write user-defined scanners and to eliminate unnecessary scanner calls. This will require changing your user-defined SCanner definitions. XXX - The .sconsign file format has been changed from ASCII to a pickled Python data structure. This improves performance and future extensibility, but means that the first time you execute SCons 0.10 on an already-existing source tree built with SCons 0.09 or earlier, SCons will report for every .sconsign file in the tree: SCons warning: Ignoring corrupt .sconsign file: xxx These warnings are normal in this situation and can be safely ignored. - The format of all error and warning messages has been made consistent. All error messages now begin with "scons: ***" and all warning messages now begin with "scons: warning:". - SCons now prints a description of Python functions that are invoked to build a target. Please note the following important changes since release 0.08: - The SetCommandHandler() function has been superceded by the SPAWN, SHELL and ESCAPE construction variables. - SCons now exits with an error message if any source files or implicit dependency files for a target do not exist and have no Builder. SCons used to ignore these files, so builds that formally succeeded despite the absence of a scanned file will now fail unless the -k (keep going on error) flag is used. - The specification of the name for the 'lib' tool (the Microsoft library archiver) has now been changed to 'mslib'. If you previously used the Tool() method to fetch the 'lib' tool explicitly, you will need to change the name in the call to 'mslib': env = Environment(tools = [ Tool('mslib') ]) - In order to make it clear what SCons is doing when, SCons now prints explicit messages: scons: Reading SConscript files ... scons: done reading SConscript files. scons: Building targets ... scons: done building targets. These message might interfere with scripts that examine SCons output. These messages may be suppressed with the new -Q option. - User defined build arguments passed into builder calls are no longer given to emitters, generators, and function actions as keyword arguments, but are instead passed as construction variables. Owing to an extensive test suite, the SCons team believes that this release is of sufficient quality that you can use it for real work, despite the "alpha" label. Nevertheless, because this is an alpha release, heed the following disclaimers: - There may, of course, be bugs. Please report any bugs or other problems that you find to our bug tracker at our SourceForge project page: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=30337&atid=398971 We have a reliable bug-fixing methodology already in place and strive to respond to problems relatively quickly. - It is possible that interfaces will change in future releases. We will strive to hold this to a minimum, but you may need to modify your SConscript files in the future if there is a compelling reason to change an interface. - Documentation is spottier than we'd like. You may need to dive into the source code to figure out how to do something. Asking questions on the scons-users mailing list is also welcome. We will be addressing the documentation in upcoming releases, but would be more than glad to have your assistance in correcting this problem... :-) In particular, the "SCons Design" documentation on the SCons web site is currently out of date, as we made significant changes to portions of the interface as we figured out what worked and what didn't during implementation. - There may be performance issues. Improving SCons performance is an ongoing priority. If you still find the performance unacceptable, we would very much like to hear from you and learn more about your configuration so we can optimize the right things. - Error messages don't always exist where they'd be helpful. Please let us know about any errors you ran into that would have benefitted from a (more) descriptive message. KNOWN PROBLEMS IN THIS RELEASE: For a complete list of known problems, consult the SCons bug tracker page at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=398971&group_id=30337&func=browse - Support for parallel builds (-j) does not work on WIN32 systems prior to *official* Python release 2.2 (not 2.2 pre-releases). Prior to Python 2.2, there is a bug in Python's Win32 implementation such that when a thread spawns an external command, it blocks all threads from running. This breaks the SCons multithreading architecture used to support -j builds. We have included a patch file, os_spawnv_fix.diff, that you can use if you you want to fix your version of Python to support parallel builds in SCons. - Again, the "SCons Design" documentation on the SCons web site is currently out of date. Take what you read there with a grain of salt. - If a file is specified to be built in multiple ways, the last processed builder specification overwrites all other builders, without any warning. - Executing the -u or -U option from a source directory that has an associated BuildDir() does not build the targets in the BuildDir(). - No support yet for the following future features: - No support for caching built files. - No support yet for the following command-line options: -d -e -l --list-actions --list-derived --list-where -o --override -p -r -R --random -w --write-filenames -W --warn-undefined-variables Thank you for your interest, and please let us know how we can help improve SCons for your needs. Steven Knight knight at baldmt dot com http://www.baldmt.com/~knight/ With plenty of help from the SCons Development team: Chad Austin Charles Crain Steve Leblanc Anthony Roach Terrel Shumway