Re: autotools gives autopain

[BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne gmail com>]

> 1) SCons intentionally ignores most standard *FLAGS (documentation says
> so). You have to edit one or more SConstruct files to force flags you
> want for your platform (it's a SuSE packaging convention), not flags
> decided by somebody for it. This is the simplest solution, working only
> in some projects:

According to the devs, that is a feature of scons. This page has a
workaround: http://www.scons.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ImportingEnvironmentSettings
Although I think your real problem is badly written SConstruct-files.

> 2) It is hard to change hardwired default paths and change, say /usr/lib
> to /usr/lib64 for all packages. It took me about 4 hours of debugging to
> get rid all of -L/usr/lib causing build failures. This covers only most
> common problems:

I think you are being unfair to scons. Ofcourse it is not right to
hardwire architecture dependent paths in SConstruct-files, but that's
not a problem with scons, it's a problem with bad SConstruct files.
Likewise, someone could hardwire installation paths in Makefiles.
Scons really is nothing more than a very nice make-replacement inside
a very nice programming language. A fairer comparision would be
bksys/scons (which kde is built with) against autotools/make.

> 4) I did not find any DESTDIR support, needed for comfortable packaging
> without root privileges. One has to go back 10 years and use:
>
> scons PREFIX=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr install

What is destdir? Can you explain what the equivalent autotools/make
thing is and what it does?

--
mvh Björn