Re: autotools and ada

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> writes:

> XML/Ada uses the autotools, maybe you should have a look. I have myself
> avoided the autotools because this is a pain to use on Windows.

With the latest Cygwin distribution, and installing Cygwin at c:/
(that is, / is mounted as c:/, not c:/cygwin), automake works ok on
Windows.

I have an example project using automake and autoconf on Windows for
an Ada project, if anyone is interested. It may be broken with the
current tools; I've stopped using it.

I found the autotools useful but fragile (they are written in Perl and
m4). They are a reasonable solution to the problem of installing
projects on diverse systems.

One thing they do is encourage the Gnu standard directory structure,
which is a good idea.

To be fully useful with Ada, there needs to be a shared set of macros
written (in m4) for finding and executing GNAT tools (and/or other Ada
toolsets).

In addition, pkg-config now does some of what autoconf does, and is a
better solution for that subset of the problem, because pkg-config has
a mechanism for automatically including transitive dependencies.

-- 
-- Stephe