Re: autotools and ada

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> Matthieu Moy a écrit :
> 
>>I have no experience with the autotools with Ada, but I believe
>>automake is of no use if you use gnatmake or equivalent. autoconf
>>itself is still usefull, but it is anyway mostly language independant.
> 
> 
> No automake is still useful for Ada. gnatmake only build the tool. But
> you probably also want to install, setup the build, create tarball for
> distribution... all this can be done in makefiles.

If your programs are just Ada, chances are that you can do
software configuration more or less from within the language
using the Ada make tools provided with your toolset.

For example, use suitable package renamings.
Replace #ifdef hacks with one-spec many-bodies.
Place the different bodies in different directories,
etc etc etc.

autotools running on anything but well-autotested Unix platforms
tends to grow into a maintenance nightmare AFAICS.
The more I have to cope with auto*ed software on non-Unix
platforms, the more I think autotools is an oxymoron.