From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,ab5f27c42c253ac5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!cyclone-sf.pbi.net!151.164.30.34!cyclone.swbell.net!bos-service1.raytheon.com!dfw-service2.ext.ray.com.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Mark H Johnson User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: GNAT and GNU build system References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:33:28 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.27.48.39 X-Complaints-To: news@ext.ray.com X-Trace: dfw-service2.ext.ray.com 1091626408 192.27.48.39 (Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:33:28 CDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:33:28 CDT Organization: Raytheon Company Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2536 Date: 2004-08-04T08:33:28-05:00 List-Id: Tapio Kelloniemi wrote: > Lutz Donnerhacke 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