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From: Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Implementing C/C++ style #include...
Date: 26 Mar 2001 13:23:17 -0500
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Date: 2001-03-26T18:37:44+00:00
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Florian Weimer <Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE> writes:

> Anton Gibbs <anton@zooks.demon.co.uk> writes:
> 
> > I agree that Ada is rich enough to do the programming part of systems
> > development without the need for a pre-processor but my experience is
> > that a pre-processor can help enormously with configuration management.
> 
> Even for medium-sized projects, it doesn't.  For example, Linux kernel
> development is quite difficult because no developer can build the
> kernel in more than a few configurations, but there are more then
> 2**50 possible configurations.  As a result, it happens all the time
> that one change breaks some special configurations, and there's really
> no way to test automatically for such problems.

On two of my current projects, I have a requirement to support at
least two different mixes of targets and/or compilers. My testing
procedure includes running _all_ possible variants _every_ _time_.

So yes, supporting a system like Linux, with thousands of variants, is
_hard_. But that does _not_ mean preprocessing is not useful on
systems with just a few variants, that can all be tested.

And anyway, what is the alternative for Linux? I guess structuring it
so the number of configurations is actually linear with the number of
targets, but is that really possible?

-- 
-- Stephe