If you are reading this in the git repository, the contents
refer to *unreleased* changes since the last SCons release.
Past official release announcements appear at:

    https://scons.org/tag/releases.html

==================================================================

A new SCons release, NEXT_RELEASE, is now available on the SCons download page:

    https://scons.org/pages/download.html


Here is a summary of the changes since PREVIOUS_RELEASE:

NEW FUNCTIONALITY
-----------------

- List new features (presumably why a checkpoint is being released)

DEPRECATED FUNCTIONALITY
------------------------

- List anything that's been deprecated since the last release

CHANGED/ENHANCED EXISTING FUNCTIONALITY
---------------------------------------

- List modifications to existing features, where the previous behavior
  wouldn't actually be considered a bug

FIXES
-----

- List fixes of outright bugs

- Fix --debug=includes for case of multiple source files.

IMPROVEMENTS
------------

- List improvements that wouldn't be visible to the user in the
  documentation:  performance improvements (describe the circumstances
  under which they would be observed), or major code cleanups

- Reduce unneeded computation of overrides. The Mkdir builder used an
  unknown argument ('explain') on creation, causing it to be considered
  an override. Also, if override dict is empty, don't even call the
  Override factory function.

PACKAGING
---------

- List changes in the way SCons is packaged and/or released

DOCUMENTATION
-------------

- List any significant changes to the documentation (not individual
  typo fixes, even if they're mentioned in src/CHANGES.txt to give
  the contributor credit)

- Fix SCons Docbook schema to work with lxml > 5

- More clarifications in manpage Builder Methods section.

- Handle the default (unset) ProgressObject differently for the sole
  purpose of avoiding Sphinx 9.0+ blowing up on it (it's been giving
  a warning for years, but now it's a fatal error). Affects only the
  API doc build.

- Improve covarage of API doc build by ignoring any setting of
  __all__ in a package and not showing inherited members from optparse.

- All functions/classes/non-dunder methods in Environment now have docstrings.

- Add possible build failure when targeting 32-bit arm using Visual
  Studio 2022 with Windows SDK version 10.0.26100.0 or later installed
  to the known issues in SCons/Tool/MSCommon/README.rst.

DEVELOPMENT
-----------

- List visible changes in the way SCons is developed

- Introduce some unit tests for the file locking utility routines

- Purge vim/emac local variable bloat.
- Implement type hints for Node subclasses.
- Ruff: Handle F401 exclusions more granularly, remove per-file exclusions.
- Update pyproject.toml to support Python 3.14 and remove restrictions on lxml version install
- Unify internal "_null" sentinel usage.
- Docbook tests: improve skip message, more clearly indicate which test
  need actual installed system programs (add -live suffix).

- MSVC: Added a host/target batch file configuration table for Visual
  Studio 2026.  Visual Studio 2026 removed support for 32-bit arm targets.


Thanks to the following contributors listed below for their contributions to this release.
==========================================================================================
.. code-block:: text

    git shortlog --no-merges -ns PREVIOUS_RELEASE..HEAD
