Version 0.06 of SCons has been released and is available for download from the SCons web site: http://www.scons.org/ Or through the download link at the SCons project page at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scons/ RPM and Debian packages and a Win32 installer are all available, in addition to the traditional .tar.gz and .zip files. WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE? IMPORTANT: This release contains the following interface changes: - FunctionAction arguments are now Nodes, not strings. This release adds the following features: - New RANLIB and RANLIBFLAGS construction variables. - A new configurable CFILESUFFIX for the Builder of .l and .y files into C files. - A CXXFile Builder that turns .ll and .yy files into .cc files (configurable via a CXXFILESUFFIX construction variable). - A new --profile=FILE option to make profiling SCons easier. - Support for Aliases (phony targets). - A new WhereIs() method for searching for path names to executables. - New PDF and PostScript document builders. - New support for compiling Fortran programs from a variety of suffixes (a la GNU Make): .f, .F, .for, .FOR, .fpp and .FPP - A new CPPFLAGS variable on all default commands that use the C preprocessor. - CPPPATH, LIBPATH and LIBS can now be specified as white-space separated lists of directories/libraries. - A new -U option. - Support env['VAR'] syntax to fetch construction variable values. The following fixes have been added: - Command generators now expand construction variables. - Use the POSIX-standard lex -t flag, not the GNU-specific -o flag. (Bug reported by Russell Christensen.) - Fixed an exception when CPPPATH or LIBPATH is a null string. (Bug reported by Richard Kiss.) - Construction variables with values of 0 were incorrectly interpolated as ''. Performance has been improved as follows: - A dictionary, not a list, is now used to track a Node's parents. The following changes have been made to the SCons packaging: - Both installation and source packages are now available as .zip files, in addition to .tar.gz files. The documentation has been improved: - The LIBS and ARGUMENTS construction variables have been documented. - The Precious() method has been documented. WHAT IS SCONS? SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, or make tool) written in Python. Its design is based on the design which won the Software Carpentry build tool competition in August 2000 (in turn derived from the Perl-based Cons build tool). Distinctive features of SCons include: - configuration files are Python scripts, allowing the full use of a real scripting language to solve build problems - a modular architecture allows the SCons Build Engine to be embedded in other Python software - a global view of all dependencies; no multiple passes to get everything built - the ability to scan files for implicit dependencies (#include files); - improved parallel build (-j) support - use of MD5 signatures to decide if a file has changed - easily extensible through user-defined Builder and Scanner objects - build actions can be Python code, as well as external commands An scons-users mailing list has been created for those interested in getting started using SCons. You can subscribe at: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scons-users Alternatively, we invite you to subscribe to the low-volume scons-announce mailing list to receive notification when new versions of SCons become available: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scons-announce ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Charles Crain, Stephen Kennedy, Steve Leblanc, and Anthony Roach for their contributions to this release. On behalf of the SCons team, --SK