ANNOUNCE: SCons 0.98.1 (candidate for 1.0) is now available

[Steven Knight]

SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, or make tool) written
in Python.  It is based on the design which won the Software Carpentry
build tool competition in August 2000.

Version 0.98.1 of SCons has been released and is now available at the
SCons download page:

        http://www.scons.org/download.php

RPM and Debian packages and a Win32 installer are all available, in
addition to the traditional .tar.gz and .zip files.

This release is considered a candidate for the (long-awaited) official
1.0 SCons release.  We welcome and encourage widespread testing and use
of this release to try to identify any problems.  Please report your bugs
following the guidelines at:

        http://scons.tigris.org/bug-submission.html


WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE?

This release contains a huge number of new features, fix, performance
improvements, and other changes since the last widely-publicized release
(0.97, last year).  For a description of important changes that affect
upgrading and backwards compatibility, please see our release notes:

        http://scons.tigris.org/RELEASE.txt

For a very complete list of changes, please see our change log:

        http://scons.tigris.org/CHANGES.txt


ABOUT SCONS

Distinctive features of SCons include:

  - a global view of all dependencies; no multiple passes to get
    everything built properly
  - configuration files are Python scripts, allowing the full use of a
    real scripting language to solve difficult build problems
  - the ability to scan files for implicit dependencies (#include files);
  - improved parallel build (-j) support that provides consistent
    build speedup regardless of source tree layout
  - use of MD5 signatures to decide if a file has really changed; no
    need to "touch" files to fool make that something is up-to-date
  - easily extensible through user-defined Builder and Scanner objects
  - build actions can be Python code, as well as external commands

A scons-users mailing list is available for those interested in getting
started using SCons.  You can subscribe by sending email to:

        users-subscribe at scons.tigris.org

Alternatively, we invite you to subscribe to the (very) low-volume
scons-announce mailing list to receive notification when new versions
of SCons become available:

        announce-subscribe at scons.tigris.org


On behalf of the SCons team,

        --SK