autoconf and epel-5

[Kevin Kofler]

yersinia wrote:
> Perhaps off topic. Someone know the prons/cons of scons
> 
> http://www.scons.org/?
> My first impression is that it is very similar to cmake as design
> phylosophy,

I have worked with it a bit. What I've seen is that you have to do a lot of
things by hand in SCons which CMake does for you. You can do pretty much
everything with SCons given that you can include arbitrary Python code, but
as the ratio of Python to SCons increases (and for complex projects, it
will), you start wondering why you're bothering with a standard build
system at all.

FWIW, KDE tried to use SCons for KDE 4 at first, but rejected it because it
didn't do what they needed, so they switched to CMake, which turned out to
have been a good choice.

> but use only phyton on the target system and this a plus, IMHO.

I don't see how having to install Python is any easier than having to
install CMake. OK, in Fedora, Python is almost always installed due to yum,
but you still have to "yum install scons" or untar some tarball and CMake
is also just a "yum install cmake" away. On operating systems other than
GNU/Linux, both Python/SCons and CMake usually have to be installed, which
means that you have to install 2 things instead of 1 if you want to use
SCons.

Using Python is not an advantage, it's an additional dependency.

> On the other side, if i build a project for multiple UNIX platform, with
> different compiler, i prefer to use the autotools.

Why? Because SCons is too limited? ;-) Try CMake. KDE is using it
successfully with at least g++ on multiple platforms (including OS X and
MinGW), Sun Studio on OpenSolaris and M$VC on Window$.

        Kevin Kofler