[Nix-dev] Re: scons / cmake

[Michael Raskin]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> FWIW, I think Nix would have been next-to-impossible without the
> infrastructure brought by `configure', namely all the `--prefix' and
> `--XXXdir' switches, which make Autoconf-based packages easily
> installable anywhere on the file system.

It wouldn't be actually impossible, unionfs tricks could save the world. 
But everything would work much worse.

> Packaging software that uses home-made build systems usually proves to
> be much less automatic and more painful because of this.
> 
> I think CMake supports similar configure-time options.  I don't know
> whether SCons does.  If you're familiar with Automake, you might want to
> look at Quagmire, a promising Automake replacement which also provides
> `configure'-like features: http://code.google.com/p/quagmire/ .

Scons has needed features, or ldcpp expression would be much more 
complicated.