Re: GUI with Ada?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:01:13 -0800 (PST), Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Shameless_Plug: begin
>
> Not at all, you are doing a very important job. It takes too much time to
> download components from different sources, to combine them and to make
> them working. When you just want to try a new library out, you are lost.

Thanks.

> BTW, the blame is all on non-Ada stuff. There was never any problem to
> incorporate an Ada library, because Ada has that excellent concept of
> compilation units. The problems begin when Ada is mere bindings to some
> other language mess with its dreadful makefiles and the horrific configure
> tool...

Yes, I should know.  Speaking of configure, in the most complex cases
I bypass autoconf, configure, automake and recursive Makefiles
completely.  I replace them with one Makefile (debian/rules, mandated
by the Debian Policy) and one simple GNAT project file with a couple
of External (...) references.  Works like a charm.

>> Besides the respective merits of GTK+, Qt and their Ada bindings, you
>> may find that ease of installation and deployment are also of
>> importance.  By that metric, I suggest you take a look at Debian GNU/
>> Linux 5.0 "Lenny", the stable distribution.  It ships GCC 4.3 and
>> GtkAda 2.8.1 as packages, i.e. precompiled and preconfigured for
>> immediate use, along with a host of other Ada libraries.  Beware
>> though: you may get spoiled with the ease of use and never want to go
>> back to Windows :)
>
> Well, strange it might hear, but Windows API have their merits. One example
> specifically important to Ada, there is no any problem to send and receive
> Windows message from concurrent Ada tasks.

I agree but I was not talking about the respective merits of the
Windows API.  I was talking about the ease of installation of the
development environment (including the libraries) and ease of
deployment on the target machines.  Pardon me the expression but
Windows sucks big time in that department.

>> The installation is as easy as:
>
>> aptitude install libgtkada2-dev
>
>> which will also pull the correct version of GCC and any other packages
>> necessary.
>
>> If you feel adventurous, you may want to try the testing distribution;
>> it has GtkAda 2.12.0.  I am planning to upload GtkAda 2.14.2 to
>> unstable in the next couple of weeks; it should reach testing by the
>> end of January.
>
> Some information maybe interesting for you. I am using gtk 2.14.7 under
> Fedora Core 10, I am planing to jump over to the core 12 (since the core 11
> is broken). So far there is no problems, except for sporadic Storage_Error
> (caused by SIGSEGV). I am investigating the issue. Have you seen something
> alike?

No but I do very little GtkAda programming on Debian.  I use AdaCore's
Pro source-only distribution at work and have not found the issue you
are referring to.  FWIW, the version of GTK+ in Debian 5.0 "Lenny" is
2.12.12 and GtkAda is, like I said earlier, 2.8.1.

> Under Windows I go with gtk 2.14.5, which works perfectly well.
>
> In both cases I didn't change anything in the GtkAda 2.14 itself, just
> recompiled it.

That's my point - Debian users don't have to recompile GtkAda at
all :)

Oh, and another benefit of Debian is the public bug database;
AdaCore's bug database is secret even for GNAT GPL users.  The public
mailing list does not count as a database :)

--
Ludovic Brenta.