Thursday, November 10, 2005

Scons and bksys for kfile_chemical

Not so long ago, it was decided that KDE 4.0 will use SCons as a configuration and building tool, instead of the autotools and make: the common ./configure && make && make install which has served the open source community very well for so long.

SCons is different in several ways. One of these is that the tar.gz packages it produces are some 500kB smaller, which makes a huge difference for kfile_chemical which is now 121kB instead of 635kB.

Now, the KDE community, or Thomas Nagy to be precise, developed a helper for KDE software, called bksys. Version 1.5.1, however, did not contain an example directory for kfile plugins, but I managed to work something out starting from the configuring scripts from kdissert, and ended up with these SConstruct and config.bks.

Now, I haven't figured out how to include the translations, but will figure that out sooner or later... for now, I'm quite happy with the new build system.