Re: GNAT and GNU build system

[Tapio Kelloniemi <spam12@thack.org>]

Mark H Johnson <mark_h_johnson@raytheon.com> wrote:
>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.

And they really should accept even the poorest one. Almost the first
thing that I install on new systems is NetHack and I have to say that it 
is the most horrible thing to configure I have ever found. To build it, 
one must first edit two or three header files. One must know if their C 
compiler has some particular bugs and specify installation directories 
in multiple places (and making a mistake and put a different directory 
somewhere results in disaster). Then is the job of editing three 
Makefiles which contain a huge list of which one must choose the 
compiler to use, flags for the compiler and linker, libraries to link 
against... And all this twice plus the top-level makefile with the same 
directories again... This all takes sometimes an hour, I would really 
prefer typing:
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-goldobj

>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.

If this is that I have to tell in Makefile or in Ada project file or 
anything, that my version of non-blocking spawn in gnat library really 
is non-blocking and is not just a portability wrapper, well, it would
take a lot of time.
If all packages were configured differently (like NetHack and X) 
building
an operating system from source code (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org) 
would take a month instead of few days.

>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.

Customer who pay such a big bills don't _generally_ share their source 
code on Internet.

-- 
Tapio