Thursday, November 10, 2005  Scons and bksys for kfile_chemical
Not so long ago, it was decided that KDE 4.0 will use SCons as a
configuration and building tool, instead of the autotools and
make: the common ./configure && make && make install which has
served the open source community very well for so long.  SCons
is different in several ways. One of these is that the tar.gz
packages it produces are some 500kB smaller, which makes a huge
difference for kfile_chemical which is now 121kB instead of
635kB.  Now, the KDE community, or Thomas Nagy to be precise,
developed a helper for KDE software, called bksys. Version
1.5.1, however, did not contain an example directory for kfile
plugins, but I managed to work something out starting from the
configuring scripts from kdissert, and ended up with these
SConstruct and config.bks.  Now, I haven't figured out how to
include the translations, but will figure that out sooner or
later... for now, I'm quite happy with the new build system.