The reasons for installing in this way really has nothing to do with Windows, or my personal prerogative. As I said before there are technical reasons, mostly to do with BinReloc. I understand the Unix tradition of executables all being in one directory. If you want VDrift to be in your PATH you need not modify the environment variable. Simply add a symbolic link for $prefix/share/games/vdrift/bin/vdrift in $prefix/bin/. Autopackage does this for you, I started making SCons do this to but my first attempt didn't work right, and I haven't followed up on it.
The way I've set up SCons, I've aimed at it being as flexible as possible - that is, I have tried to add options for everything we need to do, rather than constantly make changes to the SCons* files. If there's an option in the build you want, let me know, I'll do my best to add it. Otherwise I encourage you to learn to use the system that's there. Editing the SCons* files gets you basically the same thing as persistently saved options, so I don't really see the difference.
I know that SCons won't satisfy everyone in every way. I certainly don't think it's perfect. No build system can possibly be - neither autotools, SCons, jam, code::blocks, or plain old make. However it does what we want and automates a lot of things for us. We are pretty close to having one build system that works almost identically on all platforms and that is a pretty big accomplishment, I think. I've done small to medium software projects before with lots of different build setups, most commonly plain Makefile, and I'll be the first to say that would not be easily maintained for a big project like VDrift. It would also be a big step down from SCons in terms of functionality (how about getting make to check for libraries, or set the build version to the date, or generate the definitions.h file...on every OS?)...
I'm happy to hear about alternatives. I'm the last person who would want to stick with a technically inferior system when there's something better available. If you know of a better build system please tell us about it. Whatever it may be, it will have to be closely evaluated before we'll consider going through the trouble to change things.
So you can hate the system if you want, but unless you can come up with something better, I'd suggest try to use the system as it's intended. You might find it's not so bad. If you find problems with it please bring them up for discussion and we'll do the best we can to fix them. I personally have done a lot to make things easier for developers because I am one...so tell me how I can make it better for you. Thanks
