[Xorp-users] Announcement: end-of-life: Jam support in community branch

[Bruce Simpson]

Hi all,

This is just to announce that the Jamfiles will be going away in the community branch.

The intention is to replace the use of GNU Autotools with SCons, another freely available build tool based on Python: www.scons.org

Jam itself hasn't seen the wide uptake that many hoped for, despite having an excellent technical pedigree, written by Christopher Seiwald to build Sybase itself in '96.

Motivation:
	I've had an experimental private branch where Boost.BuildV2 was in use. This is a very technically strong tool for C++ and Boost users, based on Boost's own fork of Jam, BJam.
	However, whilst it's as portable as Boost itself is, it suffers from poor uptake. This is mostly because the language within Boost.BuildV2 is unlike any other.
	The Boost team themselves have been seriously looking at a Python based rewrite, and code drops post-milestone 12 of Boost.BuildV2 are part of that rewrite. However, SCons itself is written in Python already, and offers most of its advantages.

	That, and GNU autotools is a serious impediment to large scale C++ development. XORP's scope puts it just inside the category of 'large scale C++'.

Thanks for your ongoing support of XORP.

regards,
BMS