Re: gprbuild fun

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

David Botton <david@botton.com> writes:

(in response to Vincent. David, could you get your newsreader to include
the person you're quoting?)

>> Sure. What could be the starting point ? Is gnatmake full FSF ? Could
>> it be possible to add a sort of Ant or Maven written in Ada to
>> replace GPR Build ?
>
> gnatmake is full FSF and part of the FSF tree. Once deprecated unless
> something changes it will no longer be possible to build an FSF GNAT
> using FSF tools. As it is, I doubt there will be future Windows 64
> builds available already after 4.9.x unless we do something.

The deprecated parts of gnatmake are the use of GPR project files and
the creation of libraries (which gnatmake doesn't do well anyway, at any
rate for Mac dylibs).

There are no project files in the FSF GCC build process (actually there
is one in the GCC tree, zlib/contrib/ada/zlib.gpr, imported from the
zlib project, which builds a testbed for the zlib ada binding but isn't
used by GCC itself).

>> On idea : could it be possible to simply write the "makefile" in Ada
>> then compile it first as an executable and use it to launch the rest
>> of the compilation process ? To do that one only needs to develop a
>> "building library" in Ada. No messy XML file required anymore !
>
> I don't think removing all dependencies on ASIS and XML are even a
> question for any future tool. gnatmake currently does not depend on
> either.

We're talking a build tool here, no reason not to use GPL code since the
compiler itself is GPL anyway! The only question is the RTS.

There's no use of ASIS in gprbuild.

XML is used as a handy :) way of holding a complex data structure in
text files. It's verbose, sure, and the way it's all put together is
reasonably obscure, but what gprbuild does with it is very useful.