SCons 0.98.4 (candidate for 1.0) fixes additional bugs

Version 0.98.4 of SCons has been released and is now available at the
SCons download page:

  http://www.scons.org/download.php

RPM and Debian packages and a Win32 installer are all available, in
addition to the traditional .tar.gz and .zip files.

This release is considered a candidate for the (long-awaited) official
1.0 SCons release. We welcome and encourage widespread testing and use
of this release to try to identify any problems. Please report your
bugs following the guidelines at:

  http://scons.tigris.org/bug-submission.html

WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE

This release contains fixes for various problems discovered in 0.98.1,
0.98.2 and 0.98.3 with the intent of getting the fixes publicly released
while continuing to gather feedback on other possible 0.98.X problems.

IMPORTANT: Like its predecessors, this release officially deprecates
support for Python versions prior to 2.2 (that is, Python 1.5.2, 2.0
and 2.1). SCons will function normally, but running SCons under any
deprecated Python version will generate a disableable warning message.
Our current plan is to support these deprecated Python versions in
SCons 1.0, and remove support in SCons 2.0. If removing this support
would cause a problem for you, please contact the dev@scons.tigris.org
mailing list.

For a complete list of changes since the previous major release, see
the official change log:

  http://www.scons.org/CHANGES.txt

Here is a summary of the changes since the most recent 0.98.0 release:

FIXES

• Fixed Configure context checks not getting run if a previous
  check using the same compiler (or other tool) failed.
• A problem has been fixed with SCons creating huge strings in the
  .sconsign file over repeated use of Configure contexts or Python
  Value nodes with string values containing newlines or backslashes.
• SCons now handles Visual Studio 8 settings for multiple destinations
  in the INCLUDE, LIBRARY and PATH variables.
• Signatures for Python function actions with closures have been
  fixed for Python versions prior to 2.5.
• A syntax error in the Intel C compiler support on Windows has been fixed.
• The default value of $SHF77FLAGS now includes $F77FLAGS.

DOCUMENTATION

• The VariantDir() descriptions in the man page have been clarified.

Thanks to Benoit Belley, David Cournapeau, Jonas Olsson and Greg Noel
for their contributsion to this release.

  --SK