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authorLuca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org>2010-01-02 20:56:27 +0100
committerLuca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org>2010-01-02 20:56:27 +0100
commit72c578fd4b0b4a5a43e18594339ac4ff26c376dc (patch)
treecadaf3abe37a1066ceae933bc8fe7b75c85f56d2 /doc/design/bground.xml
parent548ed1064f327bccc6e538806740d41ea2d928a1 (diff)
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+<!--
+
+ Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003 Steven Knight
+
+ Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
+ a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
+ "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
+ without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
+ distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
+ permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
+ the following conditions:
+
+ The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
+ in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
+
+ THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
+ KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
+ WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
+ NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
+ LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
+ OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
+ WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
+
+-->
+
+ <para>
+
+ Most of the ideas in &SCons; originate with &Cons;, a Perl-based
+ software construction utility that has been in use by a small but
+ growing community since its development by Bob Sidebotham at FORE
+ Systems in 1996. The &Cons; copyright was transferred in 2000 from
+ Marconi (who purchased FORE Systems) to the Free Software Foundation.
+ I've been a principal implementer and maintainer of &Cons; for several
+ years.
+
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+
+ &Cons; was originally designed to handle complicated software build
+ problems (multiple directories, variant builds) while keeping the
+ input files simple and maintainable. The general philosophy is that
+ the build tool should ``do the right thing'' with minimal input
+ from an unsophisticated user, while still providing a rich set of
+ underlying functionality for more complicated software construction
+ tasks needed by experts.
+
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+
+ In 2000, the Software Carpentry sought entries in a contest for a
+ new, Python-based build tool that would provide an improvement
+ over Make for physical scientists and other non-programmers
+ struggling to use their computers more effectively. Prior to that,
+ the idea of combining the superior build architecture of &Cons;
+ with the easier syntax of Python had come up several times on
+ the <literal>cons-discuss</literal> mailing list. The Software
+ Carpentry contest provided the right motivation to spend some
+ actual time working on a design document.
+
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+
+ After two rounds of competition, the submitted design, named
+ <application>ScCons</application>, won the competition. Software
+ Carpentry, however, did not immediately fund implementation of the
+ build tool, instead contracting for additional, more detailed draft(s)
+ of the design document. This proved to be not as strong motivation as
+ actual coding, and after several months of inactivity, I essentially
+ resigned from the Software Carpentry effort in early 2001 to start
+ working on the tool independently.
+
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+
+ After half a year of prototyping some of the important infrastructure,
+ I accumulated enough code to take the project public at SourceForge,
+ renaming it &SCons; to distinguish it slightly from the version of the
+ design that won the Software Carpentry contest while still honoring
+ its roots there and in the original &Cons; utility. And also because
+ it would be a teensy bit easier to type.
+
+ </para>