Re: organizing deep source trees with child packages

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

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Placing all of your source files in one, or a few, directories
>> will not solve the problem either, but at least it will not make it
>> worse.
>
> There is a case when you need directories, that is OS/Debugging support.
> Usually I have files with the same names containing OS-dependent
> implementations selected by a GPR scenario variable.

This is one of a few cases, with shared libraries, where directories
may be OK.  But, for multiple possible files corresponding to a unit,
it is also possible to use files with different names in a single
directory.  This is what GNAT does for example.

>>>> I vote for the gnat convention, because the mapping is trivial, and
>>>> directories are a pain.
>
>>> Yes, they are when the tools are feeble. With proper tools you would not
>>> care.
>
>> But you will always have to use a feeble tool at one point or
>> another.  Think of version control systems, backup systems, pretty-
>> printers, find+grep, etc. which do not know, or want to know, about
>> file naming conventions or the semantics of Ada.
>
> What the use of them then? Except for backup which stores the whole file
> system anyway, the version control system must know Ada in order to build
> release versions, build and run automatic tests. The pretty printer must
> know it to be pretty, grep (or some more decent thing) must know Ada in
> order to search Ada sources by contents.

Except that existing version control systems do not know Ada and do
not build or run tests; these are the jobs of other tools, which do
not know Ada either.

> Right, that is why IDE must know Ada.

Yes but I also need good support for C, Bourne shell, SQL, flat files,
and occasionally some other languages too.  With a unified way to find
any entity defined in any of them (e.g. a C function imported in Ada,
a shell script calling an executable compiled from Ada, a flat file
containing the name of a database column which is also referenced in
Ada and SQL, etc.).  Sometimes, we simply have to fall back on find
and grep.

--
Ludovic Brenta.