Re: GNAT nightmarre

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

| > OK, it seems like we're making some progress (althought I don't find
| > the above requirements quite natural, but that is another story).
| 
| Well I am not sure why you would find these requirements unnatural. 

I don't want to side track the main issue, however here are my
justifications: 

  1) The way the GNAT build infrastructure is set up requires that
     each time one has to build a GNAT compiler then, one has to get rid of
     any existing compiler from $PATH.  On some systems that is
     impractical because some OS vendors ship GNAT 1.33p which is
     installed under /usr/bin (where most utilities also reside).  And
     not all users have the ability/right to get rid of that
     existing compiler.

  2) The existence of a compiler on a system should not preclude the
     build of a new one.  That is certainly true for C, C++, Java,
     Objective-C. 

In fact, I suspect that it is the lack of explicit qualification of
gnatbind that leads to the nightmarra I got this night :-(

| The
| compiler generates ALI files which the binder must read. The format of
| these files typically changes from version to version, so you must use
| consistent versions of the compiler and binder.

I don't dispute the consistency requirement, it is very natural.  It is
*the way the tools are invoked* that imply more (unintended)
requirements that I find unnatural.

-- Gaby