[Fluxus] scons build system

[Dave Griffiths]

> Hi Dave as i mentioned on the other mail i have some questions about
> scons and a more standard aproach to build systems
> im trying to make a ebuild to add fluxus to the portage tree (Gentoo),
> there is a dev that can look into it when its done so if it works it
> will  be submitted soon enough i think.

cool

> It is almost working but the build system in portage is kind of
> restricted (sandboxed) and it doesnt allow some things to be done like
> linking the fluxus binary at install time -> scons install is not
> allowed to work the way it is now, so linking should happen at build
> time with only scons ive submitted a small modification in cvs to allow
> prefix and plt prefix to be a choice at build time with:
> scons Prefix=/usr PLTPrefix=/usr
> and it works alone afaik but inside of portage (sandboxed) it doesnt for
> the reason i mentioned above, also another issue is where to install
> docs and examples file, default should be /usr/local/share/docs/fluxus
> and should allow a switch like above to prefix to
> /usr/share/docs/fluxus,

This has to be decided a bit. We need to think about how closely to work
with PLT Scheme - which on the one hand has it's own (platform
independant) conventions for documentation and examples - and on the other
has a fully featured (again, platform independant) package management
system of its own.

I'm not sure how far to go down this route, I need to have a look at it a
little more.

> what i really *need* is scons install to only
> *install* things, i dont know how to modify it to fit these "standards"
> i was hoping you could help me with this issue also i dont want all the
> fun to be with me :D.

This is how it should work - if scons install is doing anything else then
there is probably a problem, however - it *will* rebuild stuff if it
thinks it is required.

I think I have an idea what causes this though - if you do "scons install"
as a different user to "scons" it could cause it to rebuild, as some of
the environment may have changed (which in fact is the correct behaviour).

I can't test it at the moment, does it rebuild if you call them as the
same user?

> Another question is if its ok to have a fluxus-cvs ebuild or if i should
> make a release ebuild, i prefer cvs but i think that this is up to you
> to decide, what do you think?

I would much prefer it if packages stuck to the release versions, as it
will be much easier to track down problems - also cvs builds are going to
be broken and untested most of the time.

I'll try and get more releases out though, I've been doing too few lately.

cheers,

dave