Re: Debian package and development of CONS

[Dmitry Sagalovskiy]

About half a year ago, I asked a similar question (about development and
future of cons), and there seemed to be a few people willing to put some
work into it, but no one who'd want to take charge and really move it
forward. I think one reason is that current version of cons is very hard
to extend without major revamping, and the other reason is that there is
SCons (in Python, at www.scons.org) which is a lot more promising, and I
think by now can do everything that cons can. So if you are just starting
using cons, maybe you should try SCons instead. We use cons where I work,
because we already have a system that works, and because I know perl, so I
can write extensions and do a lot of tweaking when I want something
special from it. My guess is that Perl is cons's only advantage over
SCons, and even that is only an advantage to those who know Perl and not
Python.

As a side note, for those who maintain the websites for cons and SCons,
I wonder if there is something you can do (like add keywords or whatnot)
so that it's possible to find cons and Scons by searching Google for
"alternative to make" or "build system". Both systems are really superior
to make (in my experience), but for some reason are pretty hard to find if
you don't know what they are called.

Dmitry


On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Pierre THIERRY wrote:

> 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 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.
>
> Quickly,
> le Moine Fou
>