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Make Out with SCons
Nice2Cats writes "I stumbled across this and can't find a mention of it here yet: SCons, a stable alternative for the vilified make. Built-in support, they claim, for C, C++, and Java, built-in support for use with SCCS, CVS, and BitKeeper, supports .NET, and works with Linux, *BSD systems, Windows NT, and Mac OS X. I'd love something to would finally get rid of the awkward (no pun intended) make, and having a system based on Python would make it double good. Maybe one of the serious C/C++ programers here could give a verdict on if this is the dragon slayer we've been waiting for."
Spend some time to look at Scons. It's not a silver bullet, but it's a great step forward.
It can, among other things, generate Makefiles or Visual Studio project files, or run the build itself. It does have "autoconf" style checks, which you can embed in the sconstruct/makefile. It's built for parallel make from the start. It does not suffer from network clock skew.
And it has much better multiplatform support than any tool I've seen so far (automake/autoconf, make, qmake, tmake, cmake).
It will take time to mature, and it doesn't solve the problem, but it does makes things much better.
My SCons experience is that I like it a lot!
:-) The recursive GNU make system was developed in-house and was much more solid, but painfully slow and absolutely horrible to use. It required Cygwin (which is evil, IMO) tools and bizarre mappings from source control, so it was hard to convince other people in the company to build our project.
We use SCons at work to build a huge, highly componentized project with upwards of 5000 source files. It's hands down the best experience I've ever had for building large projects. The other two big projects I've been on used GNU make and Microsoft nmake, and neither was satisfactory.
The nmake-based system required running "nmake depends" before a build, and it simply wasn't reliable. Paranoia was high; when we hit a bug while developing, the first thing we did was a clean build, just to make sure we weren't looking at a build problem. (It was justified paranoia -- half of the time, it WAS a build problem
SCons was loads faster than our (admittedly bad) GNU make recursive build system, though noticably slower than our nmake build. With that cost, though, you get a correct build every time, something we never got in our "make depends" system. The paranoia is gone. SCons caches dependencies, so the cost for this accuracy isn't as bad as you might think. There were hiccups in the past, but the C++ dependency generation has been rock solid for at least nine months now.
I have a little toy project at home with maybe 25 source files which also uses SCons. I use MinGW's gcc at home, and SCons worked well with it "out of the box". Right now all I do is maintain a list of source files to build just like I would with any other system, but the setup was painless, and it's awesome to know that I can write Python to solve any problems I might hit later.
My big complaint with SCons is that a no-op build (running SCons when no source has changed) takes way too long on our big project, making iterative development painful. There's a command (-U) to build only components in a subtree of your file system, but that doesn't really speed things up much. Hopefully they can improve on that. That's about my only gripe, though.