Re: GNAT, shared libraries, building in different directories...madness!

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

Philippe Bertin writes:
> Then, after having wrestled (at least partly) through the Dark Dungeons
> of the Secret Documentation  ;-)
> I think that there are as well possibilities to make a gnatmake
> "Library Project" (instead of a combination of .gpr files and
> Makefile's) ? See
> http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gnat_ugn_unw/Library-Projects.html
>
> I think I'm correct in this ? Or do you rather prefer not to use this
> feature for any reason(s) ?

You are correct, but this feature was not present in gnat 3.15p (the
default Ada compiler in Sarge), so I got used to using "simple"
project files.  They work well and I have not felt the need for
library project files yet.

Also, as Alex said, library project files do not do everything that I
need in Debian.  For one thing, I would need two project files, one
for the static library and one for the shared library.  For another, I
usually need more than one symlink to the library, e.g.

/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1.2.3                 (with soname libfoo.so.1)
/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 -> libfoo.so.1.2.3  (run-time link)
/usr/lib/libfoo.so   -> libfoo.so.1.2.3  (development-time link)

Finally, Debian requires at least one Makefile (named debian/rules)
that does more than building the library; it also has to create the
.deb files, clean up, apply patches, occasionally call a preprocessor,
etc.

But library project files are nice if you don't need all that
flexibility.  In the most common and simple cases, you can reduce the
need for Makefiles, maybe even eliminate them completely.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.