Introduction to SCons

Recently, SEP decided to transition from Make to SCons build tool. Part of the motivation for this change was that SCons has numerous advantages over GnuMake:

• Build rules are written in the more flexible Python scripts;
• SConstruct files containing build rules are easy to learn and edit;
• Improved ability to check for dependencies and parameter changes;
• SCons has the functionality to create multiple build environments (e.g. 32 and 64-bit); and
• SCons can execute build rules in parallel.

The adapted RSF package also contains:

• Built-in pdflatex software that generates .pdf reports with the up-to-date SEG standard;
• An improved and efficient method for transforming LaTeX documents to html and wiki formats using the modern latex2html and latex2wiki programs.

We discuss each of these points in the sections below.
 

• Python
• Dependency Checking