what's missing from scons?

[Adam Monsen]

Wow, yet another build system!

http://scons.org/wiki/SconsVsOtherBuildTools

Is swtoolkit a fork of scons?

Why not just work with the scons authors to make scons better?

What does it offer that scons doesn't?

[Randall Spangler]

Hi Adam,

Is swtoolkit a fork of scons?

Software Construction Toolkit is an extension to SCons, rather than a fork.  We built it on top of the main SCons project, and one of the design goals was that we not fork.  Forking unnecessarily leads to cruftiness and pain, since it inevitably results in time spent hand-merging patches, or loss of new functionality from the main project, or both.

Why not just work with the scons authors to make scons better?

 

What does it offer that scons doesn't?

SCons is a very flexible build tool.  Where we can improve SCons while maintaining its flexibility, we're contributing changes directly back to SCons.

Software Construction Toolkit provides a framework of additional builders and tools for SCons to make cross-platform development and testing easier.  This framework does make some assumptions about the structure of a build - for example, that all libraries have distinct names.  To preserve SCons's flexibility, we've kept the parts of the framework which rely on those assumptions in a separate project.

- Randall