From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM,NICE_REPLY_A autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Rod Kay Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Building the 2021 source release of GnatStudio Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:29:03 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2021 10:29:08 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="e2f2653946ad473855e3b196482d0a99"; logging-data="28974"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18PXk7JANMzhN9snw4X3f3de33hvLt5V9g=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.12.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:DuOLvlN/JQF+7Gaw76/53Gy/v8g= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:62436 List-Id: On 28/7/21 8:49 pm, Emmanuel Briot wrote: > 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. It was never my intention to malign Ada in any way. I apologise if that was the received impression. Indeed, the python2/3 side was the more difficult part. > > 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... I appreciate your efforts. GnatStudio is a wonderful tool which I've used for many years now. > > 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... Building the Ada part of GnatStudio was not the main problem. The difficulty there was only with version mismatches with the Ada dependencies. These were relatively simple to patch by backporting current git code. Though I wonder how these mismatches could exist in the source release when any attempt to build reveals them. > > 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. > I've been maintaining Ada packages for Archlinux for several years now and have had trouble building GnatStudio on each release. Perhaps I was speaking out of accumulated frustration over problems which should be easy to spot and correct (ie the dependencies version mismatches).