Ok, to be up front and honest I haven't used SCons at all yet, but if it really is an honest to god replacement for autoconf, make, and friends then I'm really excited.
Why?
Because this has some serious importance for Winelib. Currently, in order to port a program to Linux via Winelib, a developer needs to first make it work in MinGW (a nontrivial amount to do if you use Visual Studio). Then, the developer needs to run some Wine scripts on it to make the code compatible with GCC on Linux - this isn't so hard, and mostly involves things like switching out backslashes for forward ones.
Then, the developer needs to write his own makefiles and hammer autoconf and stuff into working right. This is the hard part, and it's where I gave up when trying to port Miranda Instant Messenger with Winelib even though it worked in MinGW. There are many other open source Windows apps out there that I'd like to try porting (say, eMule), but they're currently all written in Visual Studio and getting Visual Studio support into Winelib has been on our perpetual todo list for some years now.
SCons might change that. If it really does work with Visual Studio files, we could rip out the Winelib makefile stuff and replace it with SCons.
What do you think? Are the SCons developers interested in helping us do this? Do any of you use Wine yourselves?
Thanks, Scott Ritchie Wine guy
Scott Ritchie wrote:
Then, the developer needs to write his own makefiles and hammer autoconf and stuff into working right. This is the hard part, and it's where I gave up when trying to port Miranda Instant Messenger with Winelib even though it worked in MinGW. There are many other open source Windows apps out there that I'd like to try porting (say, eMule), but they're currently all written in Visual Studio and getting Visual Studio support into Winelib has been on our perpetual todo list for some years now.
I use dev-c++ from http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html It has a very good dsw importer and makes a most simple MinGW makefile that can be used outside of dev-c++. Also on wine. But who wants to go outside, It is loaded with goodies. Code completion debugging class browser the works. It has only 2 flaws. That it doesn't use the Scintilla editor, and that it doesn't drink it's own soup, see, even though it is GPLed it is written in Delphi.
Free Life Boaz
Hi Scott-
Ok, to be up front and honest I haven't used SCons at all yet, but if it really is an honest to god replacement for autoconf, make, and friends then I'm really excited.
. . .
What do you think? Are the SCons developers interested in helping us do this? Do any of you use Wine yourselves?
I'm definitely interested in anything that helps the cause of making building software easier. What sort of help are you looking for?
I'm always glad to be a resource for questions and advice, but if you're looking for someone to actually write the SConscript files, I'm afraid my priority will have to be work on SCons itself (documentation, and getting 0.97 stabilized and out the door). If you need features/extensions that are useful generally, I'd be glad to do what I can to try to get those into the release.
--SK
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Boaz Harrosh -
Scott Ritchie -
Steven Knight