automatically generating file dependency information from python tools

[Steven Knight]

> > I'm not entirely clear on what the purpose of this is. I normally
> > think of "makefile" type information as something needed to compile
> > a program. This is something that isn't usually needed for Python
> > unless you're dealing with C extensions. Then I'd suggest looking at
> > SCons (www.scons.org).
> 
> Well sorry for being so abstract, let me be a little more concrete.  I am
> working at a video game company, and I have had some success using Python
> for tools.  I am just thinking about ways to convince other people to use
> it.  One way would be to improve the build processes, and be able to do
> incremental builds of art assets without any additional effort from
> programmers.  Basically I'm trying to find a way to do some work for free
> with python.
> 
> The idea is that there are many different types of assets, e.g. 3D models,
> textures/other images, animations, audio, spreadsheet data, etc.  Each of
> these generally has some tool that converts it from the source format to the
> format that is stored in the game on disk / in memory.  Hence they are
> usually simple command line data crunchers.  They take some files as input
> and just produce other files as output.

Check out SCons; it's specifically designed to be extensible in just
this way to handle different utilities for building different file types,
as well as allowing you to write scanners to return dependencies based on
any mechanism you can code up in Python.  SCons is already in use by a
number of gaming companies to speed up and improve their builds.

        --SK