What is the view of others on the use of SCons in code in Sage? Personally I've 
come to the opinion that it is more trouble than it is worth.

It may be that few people know how to use it properly, in which case you might 
ask why do they use it. I do not use a chainsaw, as I do not know how to use 
one 
properly! OK, the consequences for using a chainsaw are somewhat larger than 
using SCons, but the point is, if you do not know how to use something, it's 
probably best you do not.

But I believe SCons has more fundamental issues. Here are a fraction of the 
issues I know about.

1) cliquer was trying to use a sun compiler 'cc' at one time, despite the fact 
there was no such compiler in the path, so it failed

http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/6852

I gather from Georg Weber that SCons was removed from Cliquer?

http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/6681

due to problems on OS X. That is one good bit of news to me.

2) PolyBoRi used to ignore CC and CXX. That was fixed,  but now SCons uses a 
mixture of Sun and GNU flags if trying to build PolyBoRi with Sun Studio.

http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/7034

3)  c_lib uses a mixture of Sun and GNU compilers, despite I've tried my best 
to 
force it to honor the environment variables CC and CXX.

http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/ticket/6595

What do others think about SCons? Is it the best thing since sliced bread, or 
more trouble than it is worth? If something will not work with SCons, is 
converting it to a simple makefile and/or autoconf/automake system considered 
ok?

Personally, I'd like to see the back of SCons.


Dave

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