Using GNU make with ObjectAda

["Tim Spargo" <tim.spargo@NO_SPAMsympatico.ca>]

Hi,

I am relatively new to Ada (from the Dark side - C++). I am trying to use
GNU make to create a makefile for some ObjectAda projects I am working on.

Through a combination of GNU make (3.80) and Perl (5.8), I have made
progress and have a working makefile, however the outstanding issue is
automatically generating dependencies. The problem is I need to selectively
generate all dependencies of a particular Ada file pair, which is a subset
of just getting a list of all .ads and .adb files in a particular directory
(which can be done using vpath with pattern matching in GNU make). I am
trying to avoid reinventing the wheel by building a dependancy tree in Perl.

Since I have no choice but to use ObjectAda (7.2 - old), I believe that this
excludes use of the GNAT tool set which supports automatic dependency
generation using the gcc "-M" option. In fact I quickly tried to use
gnatmake on the project and for various reasons the code base will not
compile under gnatmake. gcc needs to be able to compile an Ada file before
it can generate dependencies for it. Perhaps I need to look into this
more...

ObjectAda itself is designed to be GUI driven and therefore all files within
a particular project are added manually by the user. Once added to the
project, the files are added to the UNIT.MAP file. The ObjectAda CLI
commands (i.e. adareg, adamake, adabuild, etc) manipulate this and other
files to determine the dependency list. I don't believe the ObjectAda tools
support "-M" or similar functionality, since essentially they work around
the need for automatic dependancies it in a simplistic way.

Any thoughts from the learned Ada people out there would be appreciated...
Even a general direction would be helpful...