Re: Source files organisation using gnat

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Samuel Harris says

<<On the fact of it, I have to agree with Laurentau here.
  Our working environment includes over 200 engineers working
  on one project, a very HUGE project. We simply cannot work
  within a single directory. In fact, most groups of 12-20 engineers
  cannot work within a singlular directory organization. This
  is nothing to do at all with Ada library organization. It is
  simply the realities of working with more an a small number
  of programmers.>>

Goodness, of *course* one does not expect a large development
project to use a single directory, absolutely not. One of the
advantages of the GNAT source based approach is precisely
that you can conveniently use a typical hierarchical directory
structure to arrange your sources.

<<The kicker with GNAT is that the sources are frequenly needed
  by the programmer which put us back in the development arena.>>

I am a little surprised by this statement. It seems like the only
sources in this category are the gnat.* units, which is a small
set of units, not often used. For these, I agree, an HTML version
is a good idea.

For the Ada units, I would think that an HTML version of the
reference manual is a much better source of information than
looking at the GNAT sources.

In any case, if you *do* want to look at any of the GNAT sources
in gnatlib, it is *much* more convenient that they are in a single
flat space, since you would always be searching by name in any case.