DeveloperGuide

SCons Developer Guide

This is the SCons Developer Guide. Start here to learn how to contribute to SCons and understand how it works under the hood.

• Introduction
• Getting the source
  • hg clone https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons
  • Source tree organization
• Hacking on the source
  • META: do you really need to?
    • Writing builders, wrappers, and subclassing (don't need to change source)
    • Using scons_dir for extensions
  • Running from the source tree
  • DebuggingScons
• Contributing
  • Mailing lists (hammering out an idea before jumping in)
  • Easy issues to fix from our Tigris bug tracker
  • Documentation
  • Writing and debugging tests
  • Mercurial workflows, explains how to work with Mercurial to submit your patches
  • Accepting pull requests, howto for the SCons admin
  • SconsBuildRequirements, which packages you need for a full build
  • Packaging
• Architecture
  • Installation (the way SCons is meant to be found)
  • Nodes (Dir, File, Value, ...)
  • Signatures
  • Determining configuration
  • Environments and what they encapsulate
  • Tools
  • Building blocks for scripting (Commands, Actions, Builders, Emitters, ...)
  • Scanners
  • Parsing the SConscripts
  • Node management (building the DAG)
  • TaskMaster
    • Running the DAG
    • Scanning for implicit dependencies
    • Dealing with signatures
  • Statistics (for debugging and performance measurement)
• Overview of Modules and Classes
• Improvement ideas
  • SummerOfCodeIdeas

Other resources:

• The man page, especially the Extending SCons section.
• Be sure to check out the developer guidelines
• JavaSupport
• LatexSupport (and TeX)
• VisualizeDependencies - display of large source graphs (DOT format) with yEd
• WhySconsIsNotSlow - runtime and speedup analysis

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This is a work in progress. Let's start discussing what needs to go in this guide.

• Known topic with no place to live yet: .sconsign. The architecture section is organized more-or-less in time order and this topic doesn't fit that particularly well. [JGN 19 Jan 2007]
• I put in links for sections that I thought were pretty solid, but there are a number of areas where the topics are still flexible. Someone with more knowledge of the internals should clarify those aspects. [JGN 19 Jan 2007]