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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Autoconf & gnat Help Needed
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 02:11:22 +0200
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Date: 2010-04-24T02:11:22+02:00
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Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com> writes:

> Vadim Godunko expounded in news:d50d540f-8fdf-40ae-9301-
> 4958c6bdff4f@q15g2000yqj.googlegroups.com:
>
>> On Apr 21, 11:54pm, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Has anyone here had experience using GNAT with autoconf/automake?
>>>
>> I used them long time ago. I don't known any project which still use
>> them now, but them was used in old versions of PolyORB and QtAda.
>
> I just feel that if an Ada (gnat) based project is going
> to gain any package-level respect from the maintainers
> of Debian/etc., it will need to be autoconf ready.

On the contrary; in most of my Debian packages, I bypass the brittle
autocrap, evil recursive makefiles (that do not play well with the
parallel build support in gnatmake) and unmaintainable libtool mess in
favour of a single, simple, hand-written makefile and one GNAT project
file.  This works MUCH better in my experience.

I can do that because I do not care about portability to platforms other
than Debian and because I can control precisely the build-dependencies.
But I do care about portability of Debian across hardware architectures
and kernels; I don't need autocrap for this because Ada is very
portable.

> This becomes especially crucial when you try to make the project build
> under HPUX, Solaris, AIX and OSX in addition to usual Linux/*BSD
> lineup. The environments are different enough to frustrate any simple
> minded configuration management system.

That's correct but assumes you want to take the burden of doing all this
by yourself.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.