DeveloperGuide

SCons Developer Guide

This is the SCons Developer Guide. Start here to learn how to contribute to SCons and understand how it works under the hood.

• Introduction

• Getting the source

  • hg clone https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons
  • Source tree organization

• Hacking on the source

  • META: do you really need to?
    • Writing builders, wrappers, and subclassing (don't need to change source)
    • Using scons_dir for extensions
  • Running from the source tree
  • DebuggingScons

• Contributing

  • Mailing lists (hammering out an idea before jumping in)
  • Easy issues to fix from our Tigris bug tracker
  • Documentation
  • Writing and debugging tests
  • Mercurial workflows, explains how to submit your patches
  • Accepting pull requests, howto for the SCons admin
  • SconsBuildRequirements, which packages you need for a full build
  • Packaging

• Architecture

  • Installation (the way SCons is meant to be found)
  • Initialization (processing the command line and option files)
  • Nodes (Dir, File, Value, ...)
  • Signatures
  • Determining configuration
  • Environments and what they encapsulate
  • Tools
  • Building blocks for scripting (Commands, Actions, Builders, Emitters, ...)
  • Scanners
  • Parsing the SConscripts
  • Node management (building the DAG)
  • TaskMaster
    • Running the DAG
    • Scanning for implicit dependencies
    • Dealing with signatures
  • Statistics (for debugging and performance measurement)

• Overview of Modules and Classes

• Improvement ideas

  • SummerOfCodeIdeas Other resources:

• The man page, especially the Extending SCons section.

• Be sure to check out the developer guidelines

• "Use the source, Luke"

• JavaSupport

• LatexSupport (and TeX)

• VisualizeDependencies - display of large source graphs (DOT format) with yEd

• WhySconsIsNotSlow - runtime and speedup analysis

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This is a work in progress. Click on the "Edit(Text)" link below, and let's start discussing what needs to go in this guide.

• Known topic with no place to live yet: .sconsign. The architecture section is organized more-or-less in time order and this topic doesn't fit that particularly well. [JGN 19 Jan 2007]
• I put in links for sections that I thought were pretty solid, but there are a number of areas where the topics are still flexible. Someone with more knowledge of the internals should clarify those aspects. [JGN 19 Jan 2007]