Re: Building the 2021 source release of GnatStudio

[Emmanuel Briot <briot.emmanuel@gmail.com>]

I must admit having a hard time understanding this discussion.
There is of course no way AdaCore will change their tools to use any of the suggestions in this thread.
HAC  is 100% unknown outside of the Ada community, and I would guess 100% unknown outside of the small comp.lang.ada subset of it.
At least for now, and things could possibly change in the future.

AdaCore has a large number of customers that have written their own integration scripts in python very easily.
Those scripts are in general not written by people with knowledge of Ada at all, those are the people responsible
for providing the tooling to other teams. So it would make no sense to only have HAC support for instance (and
would not remove any of the build difficulties to boot, since backward compatibility is a thing and python would
have to be kept)

Shark8 suggested that external dependencies are a bad thing altogether, and libraries like GtkAda and GNATCOLL
should never be used. This is totally opposite to what people actually want (see the development of Alire for instance,
or what happens in all programming languages out there). So that also makes no sense.

As the original poster mentioned, building GNATStudio is a very difficult thing. Just like building Firefox, or I presume Visual Studio,
or any large application out there. Things likely could be improved with better documentation, and that's likely where the
community should play a role. AdaCore developers in general have the proper setup because their colleagues helped them (there
is no secret documentation that they do not want to publish to the outside), and of course AdaCore cannot test on all systems
and all machines out there. But building GNATStudio is something only a few people are intended to do. Others will benefit
from their pre-built packages.