[AWS] AWS svn and development process

[Thomas Løcke]

Hello,

The svn repos made available at the libre.adacore.com website are, of
course, read only. But what is the reasoning behind not being able to
update your local copy after the initial copy?

If you do as the website suggests:

$ svn co --ignore-externals http://svn.eu.adacore.com/anonsvn/Dev/trunk/AWS
$ cd AWS
$ svn co http://svn.eu.adacore.com/anonsvn/Dev/trunk/templates_parser

And then later on try to update the local copy, then I'm prompted for
a password, and if I don't have the right password, I get this error:

svn: warning: Error handling externals definition for 'templates_parser':
svn: warning: Network connection closed unexpectedly
At revision 159249.

Is this intentional?

Next up I have a question about the development process of AWS. So far
my Ada programming have been limited to smallish programs (no more
than 30 source files), all managed from one project file. I'd load up
a project in GPS and hack/compile to my hearts content. This approach
does not appear to work with the AWS source, as it is MUCH more
complicated than anything I've worked with so far. I've tried opening
the source in GPS, but it appears to just crap out on me with all
sorts of errors when I try to compile something. So when I make some
changes to the AWS source, I go through the entire "$ make setup build
install" procedure for every change, which seems like a darn waste of
time. I'm quite sure I must be doing something wrong, but sadly none
of my Ada books are very helpful in regards to how to work on such
large projects. Any and all advice is more than welcome!

Last, but not least, I'd very much like to help improve AWS with minor
contributions here and there, but I'm not quite sure how to go about
this. Should I just email patch files, and if yes, then to whom? Or
how about pastebins? Or would you prefer I setup a Git repo you could
just pull from?

Sincerely,
Thomas Løcke