SCons 4.8.1 is available

A new SCons release, 4.8.1, is now available on the SCons download page:

https://scons.org/pages/download.html

Here is a summary of the changes since 4.8.0:

CHANGED/ENHANCED EXISTING FUNCTIONALITY

env.Dump() previously accepted a single optional "key" argument. It now accepts any number of optional "key" arguments; any supplied keys will be serialized with their values in a Python dict style. As a result there is a small change in behavior: if a single key argument is given, where it previously would return a string containing just the value, now it will return a string that looks like a dictionary including the key. For example, from "'gcc'" to "{'CC': 'gcc'}". This should not have any impact as the result of calling Dump is intended for diagnostic output, not for use by other interfaces.

SCons 4.8.0 added an __all__ specifier at the top of the Variables module (Variables/__init__.py) to control what is made available in a star import. However, there was existing usage of doing from SCons.Variables import * which expected the variable types to be avaiable. BoolVariable, EnumVariable, ListVariable, PackageVariable and PathVariable are added to __all__, so this form of import should now work again.
Fix a problem with AppendUnique and PrependUnique where a value could be erroneously removed due to a substring match.
Fix handling of ListVariable when supplying a quoted choice containing a space character (issue #4585).
On win32 platform, SCons 4.7.0 modified the determination of the output encoding of piped processes. Instead of using the default encoding, it relied on the encoding attribute of the output stream. If the encoding attribute of the output stream was set to None, it was triggering an invalid argument exception. This was the case with streams of type io.StringIO for example. This has been changed to always use the oem encoding which should be the encoding in the shell where the command was spawned.

Improve wording of manpage "Functions and Environment Methods" section.
Make doc function signature style more consistent - tweaks to AddOption, DefaultEnvironment and Tool,.

sctypes is_* functions given explicit return types. Python 3.13+ uses TypeIs for a near-equivalent of isinstance. Python 3.10 through 3.12 uses TypeGuard, a less accurate implementation but still provides usable type hinting. Python 3.9 and earlier simply returns bool, same as before.

git shortlog --no-merges -ns 4.8.0..HEAD

 9  Mats Wichmann
 8  William Deegan
 1  SIEGRIST Anthony
 1  Thaddeus Crews
 1  siegria