Re: removing devel/scons?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Benny Siegert <bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> On Sun, 30 Aug 2026, Thomas Klausner wrote:
>
>> It's the old major version 3 of the tool, using Python 2. We have
>> scons4, which is the (nearly) current version of scons, using Python
>> 3, in pkgsrc, and nothing in pkgsrc still needs devel/scons.
>
> Can we rename scons4 to scons and drop scons4 instead?

I don't think we should do that.  I have long said that given that
renaming is awkward (CVS, and also user churn), that we should either
have

  a single version, when we haven't need multiple for a long time (many
  years), and it is safely predictable thatwe won't need multiple again
  for many years

  only numbered versions, when the above isn't true -- even if this week
  we have one.

scons feels unstable to me, deprecating things too rapidly, not just 2.7
but old versions of 3.x.  That wouldn't be a problem if the choice of
which python to build your program for was decoupled from the version
used to run the tool -- like everything else -- but that's not how it
is.

I have no confidence that there won't be a new scons that some programs
need and that breaks other programs.  The only question in my mind is
how that process plays out with programs that use scons either changing
their build system away from it or fading into irrelevancy.

Thus I see renaming as churn to be avoided.