dolfin team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 12:49:19PM +0200, Garth N. Wells wrote:
> Johan Jansson wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > There's been some talk about moving the DOLFIN build system to
> > SCons. Any news on this front? We did some work on the build system a
> > few months ago, introducing libtool for example, but there's still
> > work to do.
> > 
> > I think the autotools system is starting to show its age, perhaps
> > there is no alternative for ultra-portability, but that's not really a
> > priority for us. So I would very much support an effort to switch to
> > something better for us, and do my best to help, even if I have no
> > experience with SCons.
> > 
> 
> I agree. I find autotools very cryptic and painstaking because I don't 
> understand it well (nor do I want to). On the surface, Scons seems to be 
> a good alternative.
> 
> I heard from Theo that he's working on a Windows port of all FEniCS 
> components. I imagine the build system is a major part of this. Looks 
> like Scons works with Windows.
> 
> Garth

Agree. Very few people understand make + automake + autoconf and I'm
not one of them.

I think we should just go ahead and try to create at Scons build
system for DOLFIN. We can add it to the current development
tree. It shouldn't be any problem to have Scons and autotools living
side by side until the Scons system works. Then we can just delete all
the autotools files.

If we run into trouble, I'm sure we can get some good help from Arve
Knudsen who is our Scons expert here at Simula.

/Anders