Building software with SCons

Software creation is a complicated procedure. The proliferation of commercial and open-source packages means that a typical software package might have to know how to link to dozens of different libraries or other third-party software. It might even have to build some of those libraries from scratch, not to mention build itself (and the libraries) in many different versions for various operating systems and hardware platforms. A next-generation software build tool called SCons can greatly simplify the headaches involved in building complicated software projects. I´ll demonstrate it by building a sample project that involves source code spread across multiple directories. We´ll also build two versions of an external software package to link against: a debug version and an optimized version.