Can I display the progress of a build using SCons?

Question

I have a simple build system for a project that I've put together using SCons. The project has quite a few source files, and I thought it would be user-friendly to display some sort of progress information as the build is progressing. SCons provides construction variables like CXXCOMSTR that I can override to control what gets displayed to the terminal during each of the build steps. For instance, instead of seeing something like:

gcc file.c -o file.o

It would be nice to have something like:

[1/10] Compiling file.c: `gcc file.c -o file.o`

Where the [1/10] specifies that this is the first of ten targets that are being updated during this build. Is there any way to access this information so that I can generate messages like this? It seems like I would need to know the total number of targets that are being updated (which is based upon the dependency scanning that SCons does) and some way of enumerating each one. I know that similar behavior is similar with other build systems like CMake and waf, but haven't come across anything in SCons's (expansive) documentation.

Answer 1

This can be done with the Progress() SCons function.

There are more examples in the SCons man page, just search for "Progress".

You can either provide a function to be called, a string that will be displayed periodically, or a list of strings that will be displayed in a rotating fashion. You can get access to the current target being built, but I dont think its possible to know the percentage complete.