Re: Debian package and development of CONS

[Steven Knight]

Trying to tie together a few of the threads here...

> > I recently discovered CONS, but I also discovered it was not maintained
> > anymore in Debian. The  (the fate? ;-) made that the Debian maintainer
> > just orphaned CONS with some other packages as I wanted to ask him if he
> > would mind to...
> 
> I'm also a DD, and I was surprised to see cons orphaned. I use Cons a lot,
> and was in fact considering adopting the package, but didn't because I'm
> not sure if I have the time to do a good job of it. 

Taking over maintenance of the Debian package would probably be a lot
less work than trying to parallelize the current Cons code base.

> > I'm applying to the become a Debian Developper, and I'll try to package
> > CONS 2.3, as best as I can. I also saw that there is no stable release
> > since the 2.2, three years ago, and that the last development release
> > has been amde more than two years ago.
> > 
> > Is CONS still in development? I would be interested by joining the core
> > developers team, and help with CONS. I'll try to provide at least some
> > enahncements to the documentation.
> [snip]
> 
> There was some talk some months ago on this list about incorporating
> Cons++ features into Cons and making a final(?) release. I haven't seen
> much progress since then, however. It seems that people are more
> interested in SCons.
> 
> Personally, I'm up for re-writing Cons to be more amenable to
> multithreaded builds. If the current Cons maintainers have no more
> time/interest to work on Cons, I'm considering taking it over. 

I think there's a way we could get the best of both worlds here.

>From having worked on it extensively, I can tell you that making Cons
work with parallel/multithreaded builds will require some MAJOR surgery,
because its recursive descent of the dependency tree just isn't the
right architecture for it.  It's proven very difficult to parallelize
effectively, as you can see if you take a look at the multiple attempts
that people have already undertaken to retrofit parallelization to Cons.

However:  CPAN has a Python::Inline module that provides a way to call
Python code from Perl, and we've designed the SCons build engine from
the ground-up to be embedded in multiple, alternative interfaces.  Proof
of concept for this already exists:  Asko Kauppi has written a wrapper
around the SCons build engine in Lua (an alternate scripting language
with which I'm otherwise unfamiliar)...

So what I'd like to suggest is that if you are (or anyone else is)
interested in putting the time into a parallel Cons, that we work
towards it by wrapping the SCons build engine in a Perl wrapper to
replicate the Cons interface.  Although it wouldn't be trivial, the more
extensible architecture and extra capabilities in the SCons build engine
mean it'll probably be a *lot* more gain for the amount of work put
in.  For immediate example, a lot of the Cons++ functionality is already
present in SCons.

Any takers?  My hope would be that if we can bring the efforts together
in this way, the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts and
we'll *all* benefit.

        --SK