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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: autotools and ada
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 19:03:29 +0100
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Date: 2005-11-25T19:00:01+01:00
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On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 15:31 +0100, Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> >>>>> "Jeffrey" == Jeffrey R Carter <spam@spam.com> writes:
> 
> Jeffrey> My experience, in over 21 yrs using Ada, is that make files
> Jeffrey> are unnecessary. I have never used them.
> 
> Have your programs be installed on totally different target systems?
> At various location? Can they easily be cross-compiled? Can compiler
> flags be changed easily? Can you switch compilers easily?
> 
> All this requires work and this work can be alleviated using
> autotools. Makefiles are not for compilation only.

This work can be alleviated in Unix(-like) environments only.

$ variable=`program1 | program2 'parameters'`

requires a specific flavor of process control, piping, availability
of program1 and program2. If the output of such constructs is
just some string identifying the systems, I can only think of this
as a kludge. autotools are that way throughout.

My suspicion is that people will hardly ever have a chance
of learning how to use their language to good effect to reduce
the need for configuration. Reason: autotools is popular and has
the well known seduction trick built in: Users think they don't
need to think. 

-- Georg