Re: Building the 2021 source release of GnatStudio

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

In the same message, you are talking about difficulties with some python files, then mentioning how Ada make everything bad.
Those are two different languages.

I was one of the GPS/GnatStudio developers for quite a number of years (looks like I am still ahead in the total number of commits :-),
and a large part of the installation issues (and a somewhat smaller part of the actual stability issues) were largely in the third party
libraries that GPS depends on, most notably gtk and friends. Those are very hard to install correctly, they come with tons of dependencies
of their own, were not (at the time at least) properly tested on Windows, and so on...

Compiling the Ada part of GnatStudio was not a major issue at the time. I take it things are more complex now (did not try in 4 years) because there are
more dependencies to other Ada libraries. This is a cost to pay for better sharing of code with other projects and the rest of the community (which is
something people have been asking a lot). Things could be a lot simpler if gprbuild was a more competent tool similar to what cargo is for Rust for
instance. Alire is trying to improve things in that area, so hopefully it will simplify the handling of those dependencies...

Collectively, we certainly owe big thanks to the people out there who build these community packages for others to use. I know
Simon does it for MacOS, someone else does it on Debian. Not sure whether there is a similar volunteer on Windows.