Re: GNAT and GNU build system

[Lutz Donnerhacke <lutz@iks-jena.de>]

* Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
> I'm planning to seriously develop free software packages in Ada. The
> problem I have is GNTA's fitness for GNU program building standards.

You don't need that. Ada comes with portable interface definition
capabilities.

> I would like to autoconfize my project (not very bad, some M4 macros
> can be found in GtkAda). But I would like to use automake (my projects
> are in Ada and C, because almost every free software library is written
> in C).

The monkey argument is no argument f�r C.
You do not need autoconfig for Ada.

> If anyone has had any experience or interest regarding this, please drop
> a line.

I prefer redefining the standard C-header in Ada. This is necessary, but
nearly impossible, because the C-library and kernel-call interface
generated depends on the C-compiler version and flags used when compiling
the kernel and the libs.

That's why there is no generic way to automatically determine the interface
for Ada. In order to do it in a portable way you have to study the interface
deeply and redefine it in Ada yourself. Luckily the ABI does not change this
hard, but depends on CPU and OS-version.

I'd recommend a libportable written in C, generated with autoconfigure and
all those nifty workarounds about a missing interface definition. This
libportable should convert the CPP-headers into C-headers, so that
preprocessor definitions become linkable. The Ada code will be constant and
portable, because the value of the day for a system constant can be linked.