Build / Make configuration tools and Ada medium or large projects

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Hello,

While GCC optionally supports Ada, the GNU build configurations, both on  
end user and upstream side, seems mostly C/C++ oriented (as I feel).  
Anyway, honestly, I do not enjoy these, not even Makefiles which looks  
most of time unreadable to me (I am even less seasoned with these), and  
the overall process is not always that much clear to me (mostly when error  
occurs when I want to compile something for which no Windows binaries are  
provided). I was looking at some alternatives, and found about Waf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf
and CMake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf

Still both, while they looks nice, still seems to be C/C++ oriented. When  
I read CMake as used for the KDE project was able to generate standard  
Makefiles along with MSVC project files, I cannot avoid the though “MSVC  
does not support Ada” (as an example).

What kind of tools comes with knowledge of overall available Ada compilers  
and vendors associated project management ? Say you have an Ada project  
organized with AdaCore's GPR files, what would you use to make this  
project buildable with another vendor project management facilities and  
compilers ?

At least, does it miss to someones ? Or  no ones bother because nobody  
ever faced the case ? (if the second is the true one, this may explain why  
I have never seen this)

I know Ada does not suffer some weird requirements typical of C and which  
was the first reason for the need of Makefiles to build C applications,  
but this does not cover all cases. At least some topic likes source file  
names layout, file hierarchy, search paths, ways to select set of bodies  
(when multiple are available) for a given package, linker options for  
non-Ada stuffs like libraries, C files, etc, all of these cannot be handle  
by the Ada package system alone (by the way, using pragmas for linker  
options may not be that good, as I am not sure other compilers would  
really understand these options the intended way).

If GPR files are a kind of standard supported by other vendors and not  
only GNAT, then there is nothing to search for, as everything would be  
already there. But I don't believe this is so widely used, as GNAT being  
the most widely know Ada compiler, does not mean this is shared by  
everyone (this may be only true for some kind of users).



Some testimonies and witnesses on the topic ?



-- 
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les chiens.

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