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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: GNAT and GNU build system
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 16:04:44 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2004-08-04T16:04:44+00:00
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Mark H Johnson <mark_h_johnson@raytheon.com> wrote:
: Just because autoconf / automake are popular with some free software 
: products does not make it a "defacto standard".

Yea. In addition, the moment you have to deviate only slightly
from what the automake users have thought of in advance, it becomes
an automess. (BTDT many times, auto*/configure has a very low
threshold for the arousal of anger in non-standard(!) environments.
All the more when a bunch of dependences is unnecessary
and only caused be a miminal-effort lazy automake setup.)

GNAT, or IOW the Ada part of GCC, has a way of automatically knowing
about Ada libraries, through the contents of ada_*_path files in the
installation directories.

In my view the automake phenomenon (a euphemism) works very similar
to a selffulfilling prophecy. ("Just install GNU and a number of
scripting languages on your system, the latest versions, please,
and then run autoxyz, you can then compile the software. See how
nice it works? Oh, there is no GNU on your system? Well... uhm,
you can also have a prebuilt hassle-free binary...")

If a multitude of C libraries cannot be built without
autotools, I don't see many reasons why this should be made
true of Ada libraries as well. 
(Another example of a configure-free C library is the RXP
validating XML parser.)

On a related issue, many (young?) programmers seem to think
that #ifdef _THIS_HEADER_ is a good thing. OTOH, the UNIX gurus
who have also made Plan 9 and related programs have avoided this
style of programming.
I think that working on removing #ifdefs from C files will
do good to almost every C program. The same is true if you
put some effort into a program that can be easily configured
without autotools. The time needed will come back later, many
times. (At least this has been my experience.)

GNU Make is a useful tool, even more so if the Makefile (singular)
is small.


-- Georg