Winelib and SCons

[Scott Ritchie]

Ok, to be up front and honest I haven't used SCons at all yet, but if it
really is an honest to god replacement for autoconf, make, and friends
then I'm really excited.

Why?

Because this has some serious importance for Winelib.  Currently, in
order to port a program to Linux via Winelib, a developer needs to first
make it work in MinGW (a nontrivial amount to do if you use Visual
Studio).  Then, the developer needs to run some Wine scripts on it to
make the code compatible with GCC on Linux - this isn't so hard, and
mostly involves things like switching out backslashes for forward
ones.  

Then, the developer needs to write his own makefiles and hammer autoconf
and stuff into working right.  This is the hard part, and it's where I
gave up when trying to port Miranda Instant Messenger with Winelib even
though it worked in MinGW.  There are many other open source Windows
apps out there that I'd like to try porting (say, eMule), but they're
currently all written in Visual Studio and getting Visual Studio support
into Winelib has been on our perpetual todo list for some years now.

SCons might change that.  If it really does work with Visual Studio
files, we could rip out the Winelib makefile stuff and replace it with
SCons.

What do you think?  Are the SCons developers interested in helping us do
this?  Do any of you use Wine yourselves?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie
Wine guy