[Bf-committers] SCons build system future

[Sergey Sharybin]

Hey everyone,

This a rather old topic which was discussed by majority of active
developers in IRC for quite some time now, and was also discussed at the at
least couple of Blender Conferences.

There are several major issues with SCons in Blender which were never
addressed in the past couple of years at least:

- There's no active strong maintainer of the building system, meaning all
the required tweaks are done by 1.5 developers who aren't really SCons
experts
- None of the active developers are using SCons which makes it quite
difficult to spot bugs in time (yes, there are bugs caused by building
system -- missing build flags changes etc)
- Divergence between SCons and CMake became quite huge now, this affects on
supported feature sets, stability, performance and so on
- There are list of other issues, but they aren't so meaningful to mention
here

Over all the time we were discussing future of SCons nobody jumped in
volunteering to become a _strong_ maintainer (meaning, solving actual
problems, not just keeping SCons somewhat usable). There were some other
stoppers to really bring this discussion to life -- mainly release building
process and buildbot environment. Those stoppers are now addressed and all
infrastructure switched to CMake (which is good on it's own, because it's
now using much better tested build system).

So yes, let's start discussion for real: are there real reasons to still
keep semi-supported building system in Blender? With the current state of
maintenance there my personal answer is -- no. But we've got quite some
active developers to get feedback from still.

That being said, i also went ahead and prepared the patch to wipe SCons
out. So the ones who wants to review the removal code be welcome to [1]
(please keep non-codereview discussion here!)

[1] https://developer.blender.org/D1680

-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin