SConsBuildRequirements

Build Requirements for running SCons

There is no building required to run scons: you can just run directly from the source tree, and scons intentionally does not depend on anything that isn't in the Python Standard Library.

Build Requirements for packaging SCons

Python

To build SCons for packaging you need to have Python version 2.7.* or version 3.5.0 or later installed, as well as its developer package named python-dev under Debian. You'll also need the setuptools, named python-setuptools.

Full builds, including all docs

If you want to build the docs as well, it will be more complicated. You'll need some extra packages:

You need to have the Python binding for either libxml2 and libxslt or for lxml installed. For rendering PDF documents, you'll need a program like fop, xep or jw available in your system-wide $PATH. Creating the EPUB output files of the UserGuide and the MAN page, both depend on the Ghostscript executable gs for creating the front cover image. fop requires Java but is easily installed via apt-get on Debian/Ubuntu. jw is available for Debian/Ubuntu as part of the docbook-utils package. You'll also need epydoc in the python-epydoc package.

See also DeveloperGuide/Documentation for further details.

Master script

In the SCons source tree you can also find the script bin/scons_dev_master.py, which can be used to setup your current environment for special development tasks. Calling it with:

python bin/scons_dev_master.py build

should automatically install the required packages, as mentioned above. The script is kept up to date on a best-effort basis, but might be a bit out of date on a recent version of Ubuntu.