On Sep 14, 2009, at 10:15 AM, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
SCons looks much nicer to me. It allows you to use the full power of Python for build scripts, but I have not used it much yet. Certainly the number of people who can read Python is much greater than the number which can read CMake macros, so more people could diagnose and fix build problems. Currently we suffer from the fact that Automake is somewhat arcane and adding new useful features to it (SVN revision in the About dialog for example) is a pain. It looks sufficiently capable, and it's used in commercial projects like Google Chrome and VMware. The downside is that it doesn't have native support for gettext internationalization.
Does anyone have strong opinions on build systems, or know some 'killer features' that could affect the choice?
Some of the larger early proponents of SCons have since moved on to CMake.
SCons has had some major cross-platform breakdowns. At one point I tried to build a SCons-based project on OS X, and even with hacking the SCons sources themselves, I was unable to do so.
Before the recent Inkscape efforts to explore CMake, SCons was carefully reviewed and evaluated.