Re: Debian package and development of CONS

[Steven Knight]

> > 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.
> 
> I'd say an initial effort ought to be closer to the Python interface than
> the existing Cons interface. There are some ugly aspects of the current
> Cons interface which I'd rather not spend the time re-creating on the
> SCons engine. We can of course revisit it after we have a working Perl
> wrapper for SCons, and add compatibility interfaces so that migration to
> SCons is easier; but I think any initial effort should be targeted at
> making the SCons interface available in Perl rather than reproducing the
> current Cons interface. 

I agree, in general; we shouldn't have to slavishly follow the current
interface.  That said, though, the current interface probably isn't
*that* for off of the mark.  We can probably get a lot of the way there
by extending some of the obvious SCons advantages to the Perl interface,
like factory functions for Builder and Scanner objects.

> > 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.
> [snip]
> 
> I'm interested in helping out in this area. In fact, I think I'll take a
> look at SCons right now and familiarize myself with Python.
>
> And about writing the Perl wrapper: what might it involve? Would it need
> to have C code to interface Python to Perl, etc.?

No, I though it ssemed to be pretty much all there in the Python::Inline
module.  It's been a while since I looked at it, though, so I don't
remember the particulars off the top of my head.  I'd start by
downloading that from CPAN and taking a look.

        --SK