Re: GNAT and GNU build system

[Mark H Johnson <mark_h_johnson@raytheon.com>]

Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
> Lutz Donnerhacke <lutz@iks-jena.de> wrote:
[snip]

>>You do not need autoconfig for Ada.
> 
> It is a de facto standard in free software.
> 
I respectively disagree and provide a few examples:
  Nethack - http://www.nethack.org/
Nethack has been around for a long time as a free software product and 
does not use autoconf or similar tools. The software is portable to a 
number of platforms (including several non-Unix platforms). A few have 
generated autoconf files and offered them to the development team, but 
they have not been accepted into the baseline.

   X applications - http://www.x.org/
X has had its own configuration system for a long time as well. The 
principle of using "make World" to build applications goes pretty deep 
and across a number of platforms.

   Apache - http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/98-04-03
Somewhat of a surprise to me, but it states about half way down that 
Apache does not use autoconf to configure the build process. Not quite 
sure what that means in detail, but an interesting note.

Just because autoconf / automake are popular with some free software 
products does not make it a "defacto standard". You may also find the 
issue of portability in Ada can be handled in a more straight forward 
manner as well. Certainly, the people at ACT who maintain GNAT have 
given this careful consideration since they are the ones supporting GNAT 
on a wide range of platforms. If they (or their customers paying the 
bills) thought it was necessary to provide autoconf support, they would 
have done so.

   --Mark