This is my first post in this forum, i only know that you use SVN and release (or at least plan to) on Windows, Linux nad OS X. I work in a relatively big open source strategy game project, which uses SCons since more then 4 years, and added CMake 2 years ago, to slowly replace SCons. so now we still use both in parallel, but CMake clearly the favourable method. it is much easier and painless to maintain, and has petter performance, plus it can, as you want it, create visual studio projects (and for many other IDEs, eg KDevelop, Code::Blocks, ...), which scons can not. The only reason why we still use SCons is, that CMake does not support building in parallel under windows, while SCons does. This applies to MinGW, it may work wiht other compilers. Our project uses GIT as versioning system, and in certain scenarios, SCons allows a smoother working process (less compile time) for devs, if they work with many branches in a single repository. This is the case because SCons's support for caching object files (like ccache). An other build system you may consider, is Waf, which is kind of a predecessor of SCons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf I have no personal expericne with it, but its said to be less a hassle to maintain then SCons.