On Sun, 30 Aug 2026, Greg Troxel wrote:
We still have scons 3 in pkgsrc, and I think that's stuck on python 2.7. Can anyone here think of any reason anyone -- for gpsd or otherwise -- would want to use scons3 in 2026, to build the most recent release of *anything*?
Being "stuck on" Python 2.7 (sort of) is exactly what makes it useful. It's not just 2.7, SCons in general has been aggressive in dropping support for older Python 3.x versions as well.
The problem is that SCons has no built-in support for targeting any version of Python other than the version that it's running on itself. GPSD avoids this issue via a bunch of code that I added years ago to allow getting parameters for a specified Python version, but any project that doesn't have similar code in its build procedure is limited to whatever Python versions the SCons developers have chosen to allow.
SCons 3 does run with at least some versions of Python 3. It wasn't completely free of bugs related to Python 3 even at the time support for Python 2 was dropped, but as long as one doesn't run afoul of such bugs, one can target a wider range of Python versions just by invoking SCons 3 with the target Python version. Although the same approach should work with SCons 4, it's limited to whatever Python versions that SCons 4 supports.
Fred Wright
