DevGuide SourceWalkThrough

SCons Source Tree Walkthrough

Here's a quick introduction to the structure of the SCons repository.

When you first check out SCons, the main directories you will see are:

SCons	the sources
doc	the documentation (man pages, guides, etc)
scripts	the things your would run from a cmdline
test	the test suite (end to end tests)
testing	the testing framework

The SCons directory is the one you probably care about. It is organized like this:

• SCons: the root of the SCons python module hierarchy
  • *.py: the python modules
  • *Tests.py: unit tests, discovered automatically; see TestingMethodology
  • *.xml: documentation files that are kept close to the implementation (these are folded in to the contents of doc when documentation is built)
  • Tool: Tool modules, e.g. cc.py, msvc.py, latex.py...
  • Scanner: Scanner modules for dependency scanning
  • Node: the Node object, the central filesystem abstraction for building the dependency graph
  • Script: Main.py in here has the main loop that parses SCons options and reads the SConstruct; it's what's called from the "scons" script

Some key files in SCons:

• Environment.py: SCons Environment class: the user way to communicate dependencies and construction information to the SCons engine
• Node/FS.py: File() and Dir() nodes are defined here

After working with the source tree for a while, there may be two additional directories of interest:

build	where the documentation build goes
bootstrap	localized scons distribution used for packaging