Fun with scons while building MongoDB from source

This post might not have a large audience as not many people build MongoDB from source. Fortunately MongoDB has a thriving developers email list where my questions get answered quickly. Some of my builds must specify non-default paths for the compiler toolchain including the location of binaries like gcc, include paths and library paths. Last year MongoDB added options to their scons build to make that possible and I appreciate that they move fast to make things better.

Build tools (scons, cmake, autoconf/automake) are like snowflakes. Everyone is different and those differences are painful to me because I'd rather not invest time to become an expert. Today's fun problem was figuring out how to specify multiple directories for include and library paths. I assumed this would be like LD_LIBRARY_PATH and I could use a colon as the path separator. Alas I was wrong and the path separator is a space. The docs claim that a colon should work. I am still confused, but I have a working build for MongoRocks!

• This is OK: scons CPPPATH="/path/to/inc1ude1 /path/to/include2" mongod
• This is not OK: scons CPPPATH="/path/to/include1:/path/to/incude2" mongod