Re: Ada95 support for Automake?

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Tapio" == Tapio Kelloniemi <address@hidden> writes:

 Tapio> Hi
 Tapio> Unfortunately I know nothing about automake internals, otherwise I had
 Tapio> written a patch first.

 Tapio> I'm interested in adding support for the language Ada95
 Tapio> to automake.  

So am I.  I started writing a patch for this some years ago but
did not finish it.  

I'm not sure remember why I stopped, but I think it was because
it was not easy for Automake to tell which of foo.adb or foo.ads
had to be compiled into foo.o: if foo.adb exists it's it,
otherwise it's foo.ads, yet Automake processes sources one by
one so when it sees foo.ads it can't tell whether foo.adb does.

[...]

 Tapio> Also GNAT has a gnatmake program which compiles, binds
 Tapio> and links all modified sources in the right order.

Two years ago, I've found gnatmake to be the only way to
generate dependency information.  Maybe it's now possible to use
the usual GCC options?

[...]

 Tapio> If this sounds like something that would be worth adding
 Tapio> to official automake, I'll give necessary information
 Tapio> and other help as much as I can.  I can also look at
 Tapio> automake sources.

I do think it's worth it.  Unfortunately it seems it will take a
while before I can work on this again, so if you feel motivated
to contribute such a change, do not hesitate!
(http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html)

Attached are various bits for preliminary Ada support I've found
in my tree.  Certainly the patch won't apply after two years of
changes, but it can give a starting point or just ideas.

One small-sized automake-based project that contains Ada sources
is AdaSockets.  Compilation is achieved by custom rules, of
course; but (1) that can constitute a good source of inspiration
and (2) converting AdaSockets to whatever way it chosen to
support Ada in Automake would be a good test.

-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz

ada-prelim.patch
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ada.m4
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ada.test
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