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=-1.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, PP_MIME_FAKE_ASCII_TEXT autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,ab5f27c42c253ac5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!news2.euro.net!fi.sn.net!newsfeed2.fi.sn.net!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 07:49:02 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 217.30.176.187 X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@saunalahti.com X-Trace: reader1.news.jippii.net 1091605742 217.30.176.187 (Wed, 04 Aug 2004 10:49:02 EEST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 10:49:02 EEST Organization: Saunalahti Customer Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2522 Date: 2004-08-04T07:49:02+00:00 List-Id: Lutz Donnerhacke 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