Configuring the right options to build programs to work with
libraries--especially shared libraries--that are available
on POSIX systems can be very complicated.
To help this situation,
various utilies with names that end in config
return the command-line options for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
that are needed to use these libraries;
for example, the command-line options
to use a library named lib
would be found by calling a utility named lib-config
.
A more recent convention is that these options
are available from the generic pkg-config
program,
which has common framework, error handling, and the like,
so that all the package creator has to do is provide the set of strings
for his particular package.
SCons construction environments have a ParseConfig
method
that executes a *config
utility
(either pkg-config
or a
more specific utility)
and configures the appropriate construction variables
in the environment
based on the command-line options
returned by the specified command.
env = Environment() env['CPPPATH'] = ['/lib/compat'] env.ParseConfig("pkg-config x11 --cflags --libs") print env['CPPPATH']
SCons will execute the specified command string, parse the resultant flags, and add the flags to the appropriate environment variables.
% scons -Q
['/lib/compat', '/usr/X11/include']
scons: `.' is up to date.
In the example above, SCons has added the include directory to
CPPPATH
.
(Depending upon what other flags are emitted by the
pkg-config
command,
other variables may have been extended as well.)
Note that the options are merged with existing options using
the MergeFlags
method,
so that each option only occurs once in the construction variable:
env = Environment() env.ParseConfig("pkg-config x11 --cflags --libs") env.ParseConfig("pkg-config x11 --cflags --libs") print env['CPPPATH']
% scons -Q
['/usr/X11/include']
scons: `.' is up to date.