[Bf-committers] Scons roundup

[Jonathan Merritt]

Alejandro Conty Estevez wrote:

>>What we need is a *default* scons 'developing' setting, where:
>>- it only checks for changed C files in the current directory (not the  
>>includes!)
>>    
>>
>
>What? I wouldn't trust it, crashes can appear everywhere.
>
>I would recomend to cache the dependencies someway. Or is it already
>done?
>  
>

If scons insists on re-compiling files that really haven't changed, you 
can speed it up under Linux by using ccache:
    http://ccache.samba.org/
which works by using hashes of the appropriate files.  I saw from a 
comment on the scons website that id Software apparently use ccache too. :-)

To get ccache working with scons, you need to prepend 
CCACHE_DIR=some_directory prior to invoking the compiler, since scons 
destroys the environment settings.  This is working for me in all areas 
except the game engine (whose compile apparently ignores the compiler 
settings specified by scons anyway).

ccache seems to be speeding things up a little for me, although I've 
also been experiencing the long wait at the start of a compile.  If you 
want to check that the files in just one directory compile correctly, 
you can change to that directory (normally right down to intern or 
intern/source) and then run:
    scons --search-up
You probably already know about this, but just in case. :-)

I'm not a really huge advocate of scons, but I *definitely* think it's 
much more user-friendly (make that: developer-friendly) than raw 
Makefiles or the autotools.

-- 
Jonathan Merritt.
PhD Student - Equine Biomechanics.
Equine Centre, The University of Melbourne,
Werribee, Victoria, Australia.