A work-in-progress design document for the Python-based SCons software construction tool is now available at the SCons documentation page: http://www.scons.org/doc.html The SCons design document is available in HTML, PDF, and PostScript. The design document is very much an in-progress work and will change in response to additional discussion and input. In particular, the document has a number of sections where questions are open, input is needed, etc. Input on these issues (or any other) is very welcome. The design is largely based on the ScCons design from last year's Software Carpentry contest, with changes based on ongoing discussion on the SCons development mailing list: scons-devel@lists.sourceforge.net An initial alpha release of SCons, containing support for an initial, minimal subset of its functionality, is currently targetted for release within the next three months. (Now we'll see how close we come to that... :-) --SK