Re: Autoconf & gnat Help Needed

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Vadim Godunko expounded in news:d50d540f-8fdf-40ae-9301-
>> 4958c6bdff4f@q15g2000yqj.googlegroups.com:
>>
>>> On Apr 21, 11:54pm, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Has anyone here had experience using GNAT with autoconf/automake?

I have.  It's a nightmare, as others have said.

If you absolutely must use these tools, I suggest you
minimize their use.  Most of what you need can be
done using gprbuild, which can be called from
a make file (preferably hand written, not generated
via 37 levels of confusing tools).

> >> I used them long time ago. I don't known any project which still use
> >> them now, but them was used in old versions of PolyORB and QtAda.

PolyORB still uses autoconf, but I got rid of automake, which
was a big improvement.

> On the contrary; in most of my Debian packages, I bypass the brittle
> autocrap, evil recursive makefiles...

Here's a paper, "Recursive Make Considered Harmful":

http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/

which explains why recursive makefiles are evil,
and how to do it right.  (Of course, most of what
make does is done better by gprbuild -- but not
everything.)

>... (that do not play well with the
> parallel build support in gnatmake)...

Not just that.  Recursive make files don't even work well
with make -- they are grossly inefficient.  Even more so
under cygwin.

>...and unmaintainable libtool mess in
> favour of a single, simple, hand-written makefile and one GNAT project
> file.  This works MUCH better in my experience.

- Bob