Mere Idea Development Blog

After updating the Fedora Linux machines from SCons 0.97 to SCons 1.0.1 (and correcting the code the update broke) I decided to do the same to the Windows box.

When the Linux machines were updated it was simply a case of running rpm (admittedly, using the -U upgrade option) with the latest package, and the new version replaced the old. The manual says this will happen. Reading around the installation part of the manual, it says that if I want to install multiple versions of SCons I have to do it manually with:

python setup.py install --version-lib

and this will install SCons in a versioned directory.

It also says that installing on Windows is extremely easy and achieved by simply downloading the installer and executing it. In my mind I put these two things together and assumed that running the Windows installer for version 1.0.1 would replace the existing version 0.97. It wouldn’t be the first installer to detect an existing version!

However, it doesn’t appear to. After running the installer, typing:

scons --version

still returned version 0.97.

It seems (in my experience) the way to update SCons under Windows (XP) is to uninstall the old version manually (through Add/Remove Programs), and then run the new installer.

It’s not a great deal of trouble, but nice to know before running the installer and finding it doesn’t do as expected.