SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, or make tool) written in Python. It is based on the design which won the Software Carpentry build tool competition in August 2000. Version 0.98.1 of SCons has been released and is now available at the SCons download page: http://www.scons.org/download.php RPM and Debian packages and a Win32 installer are all available, in addition to the traditional .tar.gz and .zip files. This release is considered a candidate for the (long-awaited) official 1.0 SCons release. We welcome and encourage widespread testing and use of this release to try to identify any problems. Please report your bugs following the guidelines at: http://scons.tigris.org/bug-submission.html WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE? This release contains a huge number of new features, fix, performance improvements, and other changes since the last widely-publicized release (0.97, last year). For a description of important changes that affect upgrading and backwards compatibility, please see our release notes: http://scons.tigris.org/RELEASE.txt For a very complete list changes, please see our change log: http://scons.tigris.org/CHANGES.txt ABOUT SCONS Distinctive features of SCons include: - a global view of all dependencies; no multiple passes to get everything built properly - configuration files are Python scripts, allowing the full use of a real scripting language to solve difficult build problems - the ability to scan files for implicit dependencies (#include files); - improved parallel build (-j) support that provides consistent build speedup regardless of source tree layout - use of MD5 signatures to decide if a file has really changed; no need to "touch" files to fool make that something is up-to-date - easily extensible through user-defined Builder and Scanner objects - build actions can be Python code, as well as external commands A scons-users mailing list is available for those interested in getting started using SCons. You can subscribe by sending email to: users-subscribe@scons.tigris.org Alternatively, we invite you to subscribe to the (very) low-volume scons-announce mailing list to receive notification when new versions of SCons become available: announce-subscribe@scons.tigris.org On behalf of the SCons team, --SK