Samba 4 build system - more thoughts on scons

[tridge at samba.org]

Jelmer,

 > Changing the configure stuff over later would be a good idea. I was
 > initially planning on doing it all at once, but I guess you're right
 > in that we could leave some of the nasty bits (such as the developer
 > flags) in the configure script for now.

If we are going to start using scons and it can replace configure then
I'd rather switch over completely rather than using a mix. We already
have a mix of perl, m4 and shell, to move to a mix of python, perl, m4
and shell doesn't seem like a step in the right direction to
me. Unfortunately this means rewriting an awful lot of existing m4
tests, some of which are quite intricate. So we better be very sure
that scons is the right way to go! I have no experience with it
myself.

We also need to make sure that scons can really do all the things we
need. For example we need:

 - an equivalent of the --some-option=blah stuff from autoconf

 - a way to have different CFLAGS in different directories (the
   equivalent of extra_cflags.txt that we have now)

 - keep the build information about a directory in that directory,
   while not using a recursive build

 - lots of autoconf tests for all of our HAVE_* and REPLACE_* defines

Are you confident that its going to be worthwhile to switch over?

Cheers, Tridge