[CMake] Problem Porting from cmake 2.4.7 to 2.6

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-06-27 11:09-0400 Bill Hoffman wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> On 2008-06-27 16:15+0200 Alexander.Camek at elektrobit.com wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi List,
>>> 
>>> Today I started to port my Ada project (Windows, MinGW, Ada cmake files 
>>> from plplot) from cmake 2.4.7 to cmake 2.6.
>>> Now I have the problem that cmake doesn't want to use gnatmake anymore 
>>> and says that gnatmake is broken.
>> 
>> I summarized the CMake Ada language support status in
>> http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2008-May/021911.html which includes a
>> simple Ada test project I have put together.  That simple test project 
>> works
>> fine for 2.4.x, but does not work for 2.6.0 (as you have also found for 
>> your
>> own project). The problem is the language support infrastructure for 2.6.0
>> is different than 2.4.x.  At that time I was hoping to figure out the 
>> 2.6.0
>> Ada issues fairly quickly, but I could not do that, and something else has
>> now intervened.  So the planned PLplot transition to CMake 2.6.x (and also
>> the transition you were hoping for for your own project) will have to wait
>> until I have more time to fix the Ada 2.6.x issues unless someone else can
>> fix those issues first.
>> 
> I will try to look into this, as 2.6 should be basically backwards compatible 
> with 2.4.  This is the first I have heard that there was a problem with the 
> ada support.   Nothing intentional was done to change the language support 
> infrastructure.

Your help would be much appreciated and the simple self-contained Ada test
project you can obtain with

svn checkout https://plplot.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/plplot/branches/test_cmake/test_ada test_ada

should quickly show you the problems for 2.6.0.

I should warn you that for 2.4.x, I did everything by analogy with what was
done with Fortran, C++, and C with no fundamental understanding of the
underlying general CMake language support except for the sparse writeup in
Modules/CMakeAddNewLanguage.txt.  Also I eliminated some things that were
present for the other languages which did not seem relevant to Ada.  An
additional complication is Ada has a lot of extra support requirements. For
example, you create an Ada library with gcc, but you create an executable
with gnatmake which requires access to Ada Library Information (*.ali)
generated when Ada libraries are built and which reside in the same
undocumented directory where the *.o files are located.  In short, I hacked
up something that worked for 2.4.x, but I am not completely surprised it
does not work for 2.6.0. :-)

I am distracted by time-consuming code reorganization issues in FreeEOS at
the moment so looking into the CMake-2.6.0 Ada language support issue(s) is
probably going to be delayed if I must do it on my own.  But if you have
some possibilities to recommend for 2.6.0 based on your observations for the
above test project, I would certainly be happy to try them.  There is some
urgency to this matter because certain cutting-edge distros (Fedora, Debian
unstable) have already dropped CMake-2.4.x in favor of 2.6.0.  That
completely precludes the important (at least to us) PLplot Ada bindings on
those distros until the CMake-2.6.0 Ada language support issues are fixed.

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 libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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