IMO, building should consist of 2-3 steps: ./configure && make and optionally "make install"
well, this depends if you see the ./configure file as a binary or a source file ...
since it is a generated file containing between 5000 to 10000 lines, i'd consider it as a binary, that shouldn't be placed in a cvs repository (but that should be generated for source-tarballs)
although i thought, it' pretty easy to generate the autoconf file, i wrote the bootstrap stript ...
anyway, it might be a waste of resources, to have python installed to build pd, the advantage of scons is the dependency tracking that is advanced compared to the autotools ... if you compile a lot, you will start to like the features ...
cheers, tim, who feels like being in the middle of a flamewar ;-)