ProxyDependencies

Commands that have lots of input and output nodes can be very taxing on scons. For example:

in = [...] # lots of nodes
out = [...] # lots of nodes

act = 'somecommand $SOURCES'

env.Command(out, in, act)

scons processes this as if each element in out depends on the entire set of in. Depending on how big in and out, you can really slow down the dependency verification process, as it takes time proportional to len(in) * len(out).

You can use a trick to make things better, but you need md5sum

in = [...] # lots of nodes
out = [...] # lots of nodes

act = 'somecommand $MYSOURCES'

mnode = env.Command('sum.md5', in, 'md5sum $SOURCES > $TARGET')

env.Command(out, mnode, act, MYSOURCES = in)

This makes every node in out only depend on mnode, which in turn depends on each node in in. This can reduce the dependency processing significantly, as mnode only has to be verified once, and everything in out essentially recycles that work.

The dependencies between out and in are preserved. If something in in changes, then the contents of mnode change, because it is generated using md5sum, and thus out nodes will get rebuilt.