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!news.zanker.org!border2.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!feeder2.news.jippii.net!reader1.news.jippii.net!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Tapio Kelloniemi Subject: Re: GNAT and GNU build system References: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Message-ID: Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:06:05 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 217.30.176.187 X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@saunalahti.com X-Trace: reader1.news.jippii.net 1091649965 217.30.176.187 (Wed, 04 Aug 2004 23:06:05 EEST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 23:06:05 EEST Organization: Saunalahti Customer Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2553 Date: 2004-08-04T20:06:05+00:00 List-Id: Mark H Johnson wrote: >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. 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