[Scons-dev] Schedule for redesign?

[Dirk Bächle]

Hi,

over the last few days I had another look at SCons' speed and memory 
problems. As posted in an earlier email, I am able to reduce the maximum 
amount of memory used during runtime (both, clean and update builds) by 
up to 50% in large C/CPP projects.
This is reached by freeing infos in the Node class itself, when they 
aren't needed anymore after a target is built/visited.

Having identified a set of Node attributes like this, somewhat lends 
itself to refactoring them out into its own class (TargetInfo?). There 
has always been some rumor about a redesign of the Node classes and the 
Taskmaster, which is what this is pretty much about...although not in a 
very broad range.

What I'd like to do (and actually already started in a private branch) 
is to refactor a few classes and imports, like follows:

   - move the GetOption/SetOption/FakeOptionParser stuff out of 
SCons.Script.Main into SCons.Options (have this ready)
   - move the Task classes (Clean/AlwaysBuild/...) out of the 
SCons.Taskmaster into their own module SCons.Tasks (ready, too)
   - move the Node attributes mentioned above into their own class 
SCons.TargetInfo (tbd)

In effect, funtionality gets shifted to where it belongs conceptually, 
and not where it is "needed". This might make access to certain parts a 
little more complicated, in the sense that one more often needs to 
delegate things or distribute information like option flags to several 
places. But it also makes the design overall easier to grasp and 
explain...at least in my opinion.

Now my question (see the title): When would this fit into our current 
development schedule? Should I just go ahead and propose one (or 
several) pull requests, or wait until the Python 2to3 conversion is over 
and things have settled. Do you think we need a special deprecation 
cycle for this, or maybe even should switch the version number to 3.x then?

Your comments are welcome...

Best regards,

Dirk