Re: Meet the new GPS...same as the old GPS...

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

randomm@mindless.com wrote:

> X-No-Archive: Yes
> 
> Alex R. Mosteo wrote:
>> Randall Q. Huxley III wrote:
>> > Also as with the 2005 GPL version of GPS, I cannot get it to open
>> > documentation in my browser.  Whether I specify mozilla or not, it
>> > tries to use mozilla, but for some reason mozilla doesn't open.  When I
>> > open a terminal and issue "mozilla file:///path.to.document " as shown
>> > in the GPS messages, mozilla happily opens the document.  Has anyone
>> > got this to work?!
>>
>> Interestingly enough, this used to work for me with 2005 GAP until not
>> long ago (say two months?). Then it broke (without changing gps versions)
>> as you describe, and I don't know what caused the problem, but as it
>> seems it could be some external factor. It continues not working with
>> 2006 GPL for me, in ubuntu dapper.
> 
> How did you set it up when it worked?  Did you not specify anything and
> allow it to default, or had you entered something in the browser box?

Defaults.

>> > It's difficult indeed to imagine that anyone at Adacore has spent more
>> > than five minutes looking at GPS in the last two years...
>>
>> Certainly GPS lacks the polish of other IDEs, but is not that bad IMHO.
>> I'm however interested in the Eclipse plugins, alas they're not freely
>> available. I guess that the development of GPS started at a point where
>> there was no evident alternative; if it were today it seems more fruitful
>> to customize a established IDE (like eclipse) than reinventing the wheel.
>> I don't know however how much a problem could be to use eclipse in some
>> of the supported gnat platforms...
> 
> I avoid Java like the plague that it is, so Eclipse for me is out of
> the question.  I'll be perfectly fine with Emacs if I can figure out
> how to use the Ada mode (actually Emacs comes with an Ada mode which
> seems to work pretty well, but I don't know what I'm missing from the
> one available from libre, and I don't know how to point it at the gnat
> from GPL, so I had to install gcc gnat in the normal locations to get
> Emacs to build anything).

I'm not specially thrilled by Java (the language), but my few experiences
with eclipse have been very satisfactory, even if it's a bit heavy.

If you're an Emacs beast then this is out of the question, but you can get
also a good experience with Vim and two or three plugins: the project one,
the spec/body switcher for example. I used this environment for quite some
time and also liked it. The thing I missed that GPS has is the use of .ali
files for code-jumping.

> I think GPS is really dreadful.  I haven't seen anything as bad in
> years.  It's more like pre-alpha code.  If I were a paying customer I
> would be outraged.
> 
> The main thing I'm hoping to gain from the IDE is build management for
> substantial projects.  If that's easily done in Emacs, I may forego GPS
> entirely.

Well, my build management is completely governed by the project files. I
don't think GPS has much to offer in this respect. Specially since editing
your project settings via GPS is foolish (IMO), because GPS will rewrite
your project file and fully expand the combinations of your project
external variables via case statements, which is exponential, making it
unreadable and un-editable by hand. Maybe the purpose is that you don't
have to edit them by hand, but I've always needed to do it sooner or later
so for now I avoid touching project settings from GPS.

What I do is to have my project files edited by hand, and in GPS I simply
launch the compilation of the main procedures via key bindings. Notably, if
you edit the project file outside GPS, it will detect it, re-read it and
apply the new settings automatically (even if some menus aren't updated).

In very rare cases where I have needed some pre-processing (for example to
generate resource files with awsres) I add a wrapper Makefile that does the
preprocess and invokes the compilation. There's no dependency hell since I
leave all that to gnat, so the makefiles are really small, understandable
and not bug-prone.

> If some of the vendors would make it affordable for one-man development
> startups to buy their compiler and IDE, I wouldn't mind purchasing
> something.  I certainly can't spend thousands of rand at this point.