Question

I asked a non-related question in another thread scons dependency problems that was solved by adding calls to Default() I realized that I still dont understand how SCons decides which targets to build when there is more than one target defined and the Default() scons function hasn’t been called.

The SCons documentation is rather sparse. Its good enough to get started, but not enough once you start getting comfortable with SCons. (Good enough to get into trouble, but not good enough to get out of trouble 🙂 ) Im afraid my next step will have to be to look at the SCons source code.

Can anyone help me with this question?

As for the documentation, can anyone direct me to where I can find better documentation? Are there any good books available? How about a “best practices” page?

Answer 1

To quote this chapter of the SCons user manual:

SCons will normally build every target in or below the current directory by default–that is, when you don’t explicitly specify one or more targets on the command line.

The user manual, the man pages and the source code is the best documentation I have found so far. It is extensive, but you might have to do some digging to find an answer to some of your questions. I have had to dig in the source to be able to answer some of my questions. Hopefully will Stack Overflow also be a great resource when the number of questions answered begin to rise.