From Newsgroup: comp.lang.python.announce

A new SCons release, 4.9.10, is now available on the SCons download page:

https://scons.org/pages/download.html

Here is a summary of the changes since 4.9.1:


CHANGED/ENHANCED EXISTING FUNCTIONALITY
---------------------------------------

- Nodes are now treated as PathLike objects.

- Replace use of old conditional expression idioms with the official
one from PEP 308 introduced in Python 2.5 (2006). The idiom being
replaced (using and/or) is regarded as error prone.

- MSVC: The following shell environment variables are now included in
the environment used by SCons to initialize MSVC when defined:
VCPKG_DISABLE_METRICS, VCPKG_ROOT, POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT,
PSDisableModuleAnalysisCacheCleanup, and PSModuleAnalysisCachePath.
A subset of the shell environment PSModulePath is included in the
environment used by SCons to initialize MSVC when defined. None of
these variables and values are propagated to the user's SCons
environment after running the MSVC batch files.

- TEMPFILE: A UserError exception is raised when encoding
the contents of the tempfile fails due to a limited set of expected
exceptions (e.g., UnicodeError).

FIXES
-----

- Fixed SCons.Variables.PackageVariable to correctly test the default
setting against both enable & disable strings. (Fixes #4702)

- MSVC: Fixed a significant delay experienced in the Github Actions
windows 2022 and 2025 runners due to the environment used by SCons
to initialize MSVC when the Visual Studio vcpkg component is
installed. The Github Actions windows 2019 runner was not affected.

- Fix the variant dir component being missing from generated source file
paths with CompilationDatabase() builder (Fixes #4003).

- Ninja tool generate_command() fixed to call subst() with correct
arguments in ListAction case. Unit tests added for generate_command.

- Fix the SCons.Scanner.LaTeX to mimic LaTeX's search method.

- Ninja tool now quotes targets (if necessary) when calling back to
SCons - both in the POST request constructed to contact the
daemon, and in the command eventually issued from the deamon.

- Ninja tool is adjusted to recognize and emit the right rule in
the case of special actions that the tool recognizes, like Copy.
This was working in the case of single commands, but not when part
of a list of actions. Recognition only happens if the special
action is first in the list.

- Fix a test problem on Windows where UNC tests failed due to incorrect path
munging if a non-default %TEMP% was defined (as in moving to a Dev Drive).

- Fix Issue #4746. The TEMPFILE is written in utf-8 encoding by default.
If the tempfile contents cannot be decoded by the command the
tempfile is passed to, (new) TEMPPFILEENCODING can be used to speficy a
different encoding to use. On Windows, the username may be a cause of
this,
as the default path for temporary files includes the username. Setting
(existing) TEMPFILEDIR may also help in this case.

- Tweak runtest.py and test framework to more reliably get the requested
Python binary (for odd Windows setups + Python launcher)

- Fix the tempfile encoding test regex strings to remove warnings in
python 3.12 and 3.13.

- Incremental builds in Interactive mode could fail on platforms that
support batch mode (currently: Windows). Change the way the changed
and unchanged target and source lists are accounted for to resolve.
Fixes #3029.

IMPROVEMENTS
------------

- Virtualenv support module modernized: previously looked first for an
unofficial approach from before venv support was made part of Python
in 3.3; now looks for the official approach first. This in an internal
detail, the API is unchanged.

- Add internal routines to manipulate publicly visible argument and
target lists. These interfaces are not part of the public API.

- Improve the error message when an environment method is called which
does not exist in that environment. Mostly this is intended to be a
bit more helpful in the case of a builder which did not instantiate.

PACKAGING
---------

- The generated roff (.1) manpages are now included in the
scons-doc tarball built at part of the release process,
in addition to the html and txt versions. For distribution
packaging, the manpages can be extracted from here (downloadable
from https://scons.org/doc/ using a a version-specific URL,
e.g. https://scons.org/doc/4.9.1/scons-doc-4.9.1.tar.gz).

DOCUMENTATION
-------------

- Clarify how pre/post actions on an alias work.

- Improve the description of PackageVariable.

- The "API Docs" build (Sphinx) configuration is improved, and
SConsDoc and SConsExample are now included - their API is
interesting to developers working on SCons (needed to write docs),
even if not part of "The SCons API" itself.

- Missing documentation for the Virtualenv() function is added.
Note that the User Guide previously described a negative outcome
as returning None. It is now explicit that the path is returned if
running in a virtualenv, and an empty (falsy) string if not.

- Improve the wording of Configure methods.

- Improve the wording of AppendENVPath and PrependENVPath in manpage.

- Improve documentation of builder methods and builder objects.

- All the User Guide sections now have textual anchors, meaning there
no longer be build-generated numeric tags like
https://scons.org/doc/production/HTML/scons-user.html#id1514

DEVELOPMENT
-----------

- runtest.py once again finds "external" tests, such as the tests for
tools in scons-contrib. An earlier rework had broken this. Fixes #4699.

- Clean up C and C++ FLAGS tests. Tests which use a real compiler
are now more clearly distinguished (-live.py suffix and docstring).

- Fix a couple of unit tests to not fail with Python 3.14. These involve
expectations for bytecode strings and error message contents; there was
no problem with SCons itself using 3.14.

- Move the GitHub workflow test runner files from the SCons root to
the ci subdirectory of the testing directory.

- GitHub: Enable the interactive tests on windows.

- GitHub: Enable the packaging tar xz test on windows.

- GitHub: Exclude two ninja tests that consistently fail on MacOS in
the experimental tests workflow.

- GitHub: Add a workflow file to test MSVC with optional environment
variables.

- GitHub: Populate the MSVC cache before running the test suite for
select windows workflow files.

- GitHub: Upload the failed_tests.log artifact on failure in select
workflow files.

- GitHub: Change the runtest workflow to allow the python version to
be specified with the OS version.

- Testing: Increase the default timeout from 20 seconds to 60 seconds
in the testing framework wait_for method. The timeout was increased
during isolated experiments of the interactive tests on windows.

- Testing: Update the packaging tar bz2 and xz tests on on Windows.
The packaging tar bz2 and xz tests should be skipped on Windows 10
and GitHub windows-2022. The packaging tar bz2 and xz tests should
be run on Windows 11 and GitHub windows-2025.

- Ninja: Increase the number of generated source files in the
iterative speedup test from 200 to 250. Increasing the workload
should reduce the likelihood that the ninja tests are slower.

- Add more unit tests to internal AppendPath, PrependPath functions.

Thanks to the following contributors listed below for their contributions
to this release. ==========================================================================================
.. code-block:: text


git shortlog --no-merges -ns 4.9.1..HEAD
61 Mats Wichmann
46 Joseph Brill
25 William Deegan
6 Keith F. Prussing
1 Bill Prendergast
1 Edward Peek
1 Thaddeus Crews
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