You don't actually need to "install" SCons to use it.
Nor do you need to "build" it, unless you are interested in
producing the SCons documentation, which does use several
tools to produce HTML, PDF and other output formats from
files in the source tree.
All you need to do is
call the scons.py
driver script in a
location that contains an SCons tree, and it will figure out
the rest. You can test that like this:
$ python /path/to/unpacked
/scripts/scons.py --version
To make use of an uninstalled SCons,
the first step is to download either the
scons-4.8.1.tar.gz
or scons-4.8.1.zip
,
which are available from the SCons download page at
https://scons.org/pages/download.html.
There is also a scons-local
bundle you can make
use of. It is arranged a little bit differently, with the idea
that you can include it with your own project if you want people
to be able to do builds without having to download or install SCons.
Finally, you can also use a checkout of the git tree from GitHub
at a location to point to.
Unpack the archive you downloaded,
using a utility like tar
on Linux or UNIX,
or WinZip on Windows.
This will create a directory called
scons-4.8.1
,
usually in your local directory. The driver script
will be in a subdirectory named scripts
,
unless you are using scons-local
,
in which case it will be in the top directory.
Now you only need to call scons.py
by
giving a full or relative path to it in order to use that
SCons version.
Note that instructions for older versions may have suggested
running python setup.py install
to
"build and install" SCons. This is no longer recommended
(in fact, it is not recommended by the wider Python packaging
community for any end-user installations
of Python software). There is a setup.py
file,
but it is only tested and used for the automated procedure which
prepares an SCons bundle for making a release on PyPI,
and even that is not guaranteed to work in future.