ANNOUNCE: SCons 0.92 fixes a potentially critical Win32 problem

[Steven Knight]

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 0.92 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?

Release 0.92 contains an important fix for a critical bug found shortly
after SCons 0.91 was released, plus two other fixes.

SCons 0.91 contains a bug that prevents SCons from working on Win32
systems unless either the Microsoft Visual Studio linker (link.exe)
or the GCC linker is installed, or a custom-defined linker is used.
This bug has been fixed in release 0.92.

This bug does not cause incorrect builds and does not damage a source
tree or build tree in any way.  Anyone with either the Visual Studio or
GCC linker installed on their Win32 system, or using a custom-defined
linker, will never see this bug and could continue to use 0.91 without
any serious repercussions or side effects.

Release 0.92 contains two other fixes:
  - Support for the PharLap linker was not working properly in 0.91,
    and has been fixed.
  - When the YACC -o option was used to specify an output file with
    a different basename than the source file, SCons would mistakenly
    think that the basename of the generated .h file should match the
    source file, not the target file.  This has been fixed.

Additionally, the Debian (.deb) package available from the SCons web site
or SourceForge project page has been updated to match the dependencies
and other particulars of the (out of date) Debian package available from
debian.org. In particular, the package is now dependent on Python 2.2
instead of Python 2.1.


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
  - a modular architecture allows the SCons Build Engine to be
    embedded in other Python software
  - 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

An scons-users mailing list is available 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, Gary Oberbrunner and Gerard Patel for
their contributions to this release.

On behalf of the SCons team,

	--SK