On 2007-02-24 01:00-0800 Alan W. Irwin wrote: > Thanks, Jerry, for this donation of an Ada interface to PLplot and the > examples. I need some help from you to get this integrated into PLplot.
Well, it appears a very common model for Ada is to have one giant executable with gnatmake sorting out the dependencies between the various bits of source code so that it decides when any bit needs to be recompiled. IOW, libraries are sort of an afterthought for Ada which has made it difficult to integrate Jerry's contribution into PLplot where a clear separation between libraries and executable examples has always been the norm. In the GNAT user's guide (accessible with info gnat_ug-3.3 on Debian stable) there are several half-baked discussions of libraries scattered around, and eventually I just followed the model used in "Using gnatmake in a Makefile" when deciding what to do for CMake. I have just committed Jerry's code contribution and a rudimentary CMake build system update to support his contribution (with default ENABLE_ada OFF). Here are the current CMake Ada limitations: (1) GNATMAKE_EXECUTABLE and GNAT_DIR are hard-coded rather than configured in cmake/modules/ada.cmake. In fact, the latter is hard-coded for Debian stable so you will have to change it if you want to play with this for any other platform. (2) The Ada interface library, libplplotada(d) is built with special Linux-only custom commands and only for shared libraries instead of using the much simpler ADD_LIBRARY command that is possible if CMake fully supports the Ada language. (3) Similarly, the example is built with a custom command rather than ADD_EXECUTABLE command that is possible if CMake fully supports the Ada language. (4) ctest is not implemented. (5) When building the example, even though it is clear (from ldd) that it uses the library rather than the *.o files, if the *.o files are not present gnatmake recreates them. I think this is the result of the strict dependency checking that is used by gnatmake, but eventually we have to figure out how to turn that off to avoid this redundant and unused recompilation. (6) Nothing Ada related is installed (there is no point until issue 5 is resolved). It should only be a matter of time (I am aiming for next weekend) for me to resolve the first 4 issues. For example, I have been given an excellent overview on the CMake list of how to make Ada a fully supported language under CMake. That change should solve issues 2 and 3 so that is my next priority. I believe the solution to issue 5 will probably involve treating the Ada code which is used to generate libplplotada(d) as a completely separate external Ada project from the examples. However, I don't have the Ada expertise to implement that separation into separate but related projects so unless Jerry knows the answer of making that happen if may be quite some time before issues 5 and 6 can be resolved. To summarize the current status, the current result is a good proof of concept on Debian stable. The resulting executable in examples/ada in the build tree passed the ldd -r test. Also, I did the equivalent of the ctest setup in tests/CMakeLists.txt on the command line, and under those circumstances the build-tree version of the ada_plplot example worked fine. It is going to require some work (issues 1-4) to make the build-tree part of this a lot more convenient and available on more platforms than just Debian stable. Jerry, I hope to make enough progress by next weekend so you will be able to use (build-tree only) our CMake build system with Ada on your Mac OS X platform. Meanwhile, I hope you will be willing to programme more of the standard examples in Ada for the important reasons we discussed before. Thanks, once again, for your Ada contribution. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
