Eclipse CDT + SCons

Question

We have a fairly large C/C++ project using scons for the building. I'd like to go at an attempt to build this through Eclipse-CDT. Anyone have any experience with this and can tell me the steps to set up scons as a builder. (NOT using the SConsBuilder plugin, it will not work with the Eclipse-CDT from Fedora-11).

Answer 1

I've tried Waf in Eclipse CDT before now, SCons would be really similar. The solution was to create an empty Makefile project, then simply change "make" to "scons" in the options. On Windows that would probably need the scons.bat file in your path. That is not much better than creating a dummy Makefile that has an all:\n\tscons type pattern in it, but is the least work.

The SConsBuilder plugin is not a good idea. It has a whole bunch of hard coded python code in there that it spits out to a SConstruct. It hasn't been updated in ages and a lot of code is probably deprecated in SCons by now. I think a better approach is to do what SCons does for Visual Studio, or what CMake does for Eclipse CDT. That means generating a .cproject file on the fly based on your build configuration.

I wrote an Eclipse project generator for Waf at one point, which walks the build nodes gathering source files and spits out a .project and .cproject file. Similar to how CMake does it, but Waf's default behaviour of creating a variant directory means you don't have to deal with out-of-source build issues. It uses only part of the Waf API so it would be possible to convert it to SCons with some small-ish amount of work. In other words, there's nothing much out there. The .cproject format is not really documented anywhere and is really ugly compared to the Java version.

I didn't get on too well with CDT though - it is a long way behind the Java dev tools - and I still use Vim with :make, so it was all a bit academic in the end.

Answer 2

You can use a Makefile that simply delegates the important targets to scons

.PHONY: all clean install
default:    all
all:    
    scons
clean:
    scons -c
install:
    scons install

Then it is possible to use "Standard Make C Project" out of the box.