Re: GNAT and GNU build system

[Tapio Kelloniemi <spam12@thack.org>]

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Lutz Donnerhacke <lutz@iks-jena.de> wrote:
>* Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
>> I'm planning to seriously develop free software packages in Ada. The
>> problem I have is GNTA's fitness for GNU program building standards.
>
>You don't need that. Ada comes with portable interface definition
>capabilities.

Ada makes the goal of portability far less difficult than C, but 
autoconf can help detecting some portability issues on the build
system and it has other advantages as well:
Configure is easy for users and autoconf is easier for programmers 
than writing some huge scripts which do many things exactly like 
configure. It is just waste of time. Implementing all those --prefix, 
--*dir arguments in portable sh so that users can install stuff where 
they want to and writing the million makefile targets which GNU Coding 
Standards require is of course possible, but easier with autotools.

>> I would like to autoconfize my project (not very bad, some M4 macros
>> can be found in GtkAda). But I would like to use automake (my projects
>> are in Ada and C, because almost every free software library is written
>> in C).
>
>The monkey argument is no argument f�r C.

It is not nice at all to translate dozens of headers into Ada, just
to notice, that the implementation has changed for those external 
libraries in next version. Unfortunately C is not very portable and
people heavily use preprocessor (even to implement inline functions).
So C headers are not purely interface definitions.

>You do not need autoconfig for Ada.
It is a de facto standard in free software.

-- 
Tapio