The standard nature of autotools, and good experiences with my earlier uses
of it, disposed me to use it for Csound. But subsequent experience has been
far from happy. I am an experienced developer, and the needle on my
personal meter has swing from "green" far into the yellow, almost into red,
with autotools.

I don't think one more dependency is a problem.

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Dave Phillips dlphilp@bright.net
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:38:36 -0500
To: csound-dev@eartha.mills.edu
Subject: [CSOUND-DEV:4295] regarding SCons


Greetings:

  I'm sorry to hear that mastering autotools has turned out to be such a 
trial for Csound's cross-platform development. While I've nothing in 
particular against SCons I thought it might be worth noting the 
following items:

    1. SCons is not a regular component of mainstream Linux 
distributions. Users desiring to build Csound from sources will need to 
download and install it themselves.
    2. The SCons system is fairly simple for the normal user, but it 
does mean one more build system to learn.
    3. Out of all the Linux sound and music applications I've built and 
used (which means most of them) exactly one has used SCons (Juan 
Linietsky's Cheesetracker). Csound would make two.

  Just my couple of drachmas...

Best regards,

dp




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Well, _IF_ I understand everything correctly now, you do not actually need
the GNU tools to simply build Csound from a source distribution that already
has a configure script, right?  (i.e. Still just uses make).  So, there is
no extra dependency for the "casual" user who needs to recompile Csound for
some reason.

On the other hand, I _believe_ that when using SCons, it replaces make,
right?  So, simply building Csound on say, Linux PPC, because there is no
readily available binary now requires Python and SCons.

Python is not a problem on most platforms.  It is installed by default in
newer versions of Mac OS X.  I suppose the same is true for Linux.  I have
installed it a couple of times on Mac OS 9 and it is a breeze.

Regarding Dave's concerns, I agree that this adds a little bit of complexity
to the process.  Chasing dependencies is seldom fun.  However, with SCons,
due to the _wonderful_ and _truly_ cross-platform efforts of the Python
team, SCons compiled _and_ installed itself correctly in the Python folder
on my Mac OS 9 system flawlessly (and from another hard drive partition,
BTW).

And SCons is not even designed to support Mac OS 9 builds (yet)!  I have
seldom seen so-called "cross-platform" software behave so well.

If it is that easy to use on the Mac, then I think that there is hope that
other platforms will work smoothly as well. :)

Anthony Kozar
anthony.kozar@utoledo.edu


On 3/11/04 2:14 PM, gogins@pipeline.com etched in
stone:

> SCons is 2 external dependencies for Csound (Python and SCons itself)
> instead of 3 or 4 with autoconf, autoheader, automake, libtool, etc., runs
> faster, builds objects faster, and is MUCH easier to understand. Also, it
> easily supports Microsoft Visual Studio.

On 3/12/04 12:37 PM, gogins@pipeline.com etched in
stone:


> I don't think one more dependency is a problem.
> 
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From: Dave Phillips dlphilp@bright.net
> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:38:36 -0500
> To: csound-dev@eartha.mills.edu
> Subject: [CSOUND-DEV:4295] regarding SCons

> 1. SCons is not a regular component of mainstream Linux
> distributions. Users desiring to build Csound from sources will need to
> download and install it themselves.
> 2. The SCons system is fairly simple for the normal user, but it
> does mean one more build system to learn.
> 3. Out of all the Linux sound and music applications I've built and
> used (which means most of them) exactly one has used SCons (Juan
> Linietsky's Cheesetracker). Csound would make two.