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<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE sconsdoc [
<!ENTITY % scons SYSTEM "../scons.mod">
%scons;
]>
<chapter id="chap-issues"
xmlns="http://www.scons.org/dbxsd/v1.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.scons.org/dbxsd/v1.0/scons.xsd scons.xsd">
<title>Other Issues</title>
<!--
__COPYRIGHT__
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
-->
<para>
No build tools is perfect.
Here are some &SCons; issues that
do not yet have solutions.
</para>
<section>
<title>Interaction with SC-config</title>
<para>
The SC-config tool will be used in the &SCons; installation
process to generate an appropriate default construction environment
so that building most software works "out of the box" on the
installed platform. The SC-config tool will find reasonable default
compilers (C, C++, Fortran), linkers/loaders, library archive tools,
etc. for specification in the default &SCons; construction
environment.
</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Interaction with test infrastructures</title>
<para>
&SCons; can be configured to use SC-test (or some other test tool)
to provide controlled, automated testing of software. The &Link;
method could link a <filename>test</filename> subdirectory to a build
subdirectory:
</para>
<programlisting>
Link('test', 'build')
SConscript('test/SConscript')</programlisting>
<para>
Any test cases checked in with the source code will be linked
into the <filename>test</filename> subdirectory and executed. If
&SConscript; files and test cases are written with this in mind, then
invoking:
</para>
<programlisting>
% sccons test</programlisting>
<para>
Would run all the automated test cases that depend on any changed
software.
</para>
<!--
YYY integrate with SC-test to provide sanity check on new tools
"discovery testing" of new tools
results recorded in a central database
central database can be somewhere else on web
-->
</section>
<section>
<title>Java dependencies</title>
<para>
Java dependencies are difficult for an external dependency-based
construction tool to accomodate. Determining Java class dependencies
is more complicated than the simple pattern-matching of C or C++
<literal>#include</literal> files. From the point of view of an
external build tool, the Java compiler behaves "unpredictably"
because it may create or update multiple output class files and
directories as a result of its internal class dependencies.
</para>
<para>
An obvious &SCons; implementation would be to have the &Scanner;
object parse output from <command>Java -depend -verbose</command> to
calculate dependencies, but this has the distinct disadvantage of
requiring two separate compiler invocations, thereby slowing down
builds.
</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Limitations of digital signature calculation</title>
<para>
In practice, calculating digital signatures of a file's contents is a
more robust mechanism than time stamps for determining what needs
building. However:
</para>
<orderedlist numeration="arabic">
<listitem>
<para>
Developers used to the time stamp model of &Make; can initially
find digital signatures counter-intuitive. The assumption that:
<programlisting>
% touch file.c</programlisting>
will cause a rebuild of <filename>file</filename> is strong...
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Abstracting dependency calculation into a single digital signature
loses a little information: It is no longer possible to tell
(without laborious additional calculation) which input file dependency
caused a rebuild of a given target file. A feature that could
report, "I'm rebuilding file X because it's out-of-date with respect
to file Y," would be good, but an digital-signature implementation of
such a feature is non-obvious.
</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
</section>
<section>
<title>Remote execution</title>
<para>
The ability to use multiple build systems through remote execution
of tools would be good. This should be implementable through the
&Job; class. Construction environments would need modification
to specify build systems.
</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Conditional builds</title>
<para>
The ability to check run-time conditions as suggested on the
sc-discuss mailing list ("build X only if: the machine is idle /
the file system has Y megabytes free space") would also be good,
but is not part of the current design.
</para>
</section>
</chapter>
|
