[gtkada] Build from source code

[Ludovic Brenta]

>> This is why Ludovic's work in Debian and my work in *BSD is so
>> important [1]. We've already done all this and wrote down the recipe
>> in the form of make/build files. Yes, there are tricks and
>> undocumented things sometimes, but these package systems capture that
>> knowledge. To recreate all of that on your own is reinventing the
>> wheel. [1] There are similar efforts by Slack and Arch users.
> 
> Hmmm.  Well I'd be interested in learning more about this.

Installing Debian or a BSD in a virtual machine, with the complete GTK+
and Ada development environment, is probably much easier than
recompiling the world on Windows.  Debian, at least, provides debugging
symbols for most libraries (and definitely all Ada libraries) in
separate packages, i.e. you type

aptitude install libgtkada-dbg

and you get everything you need.

There might be two problems with these distributions though: (a) they
don't help if your target platform is Windows and (b) they use versions
of GTK+ and GtkAda that might not be the ones you're interested in.  For
example, Debian still has only GtkAda 2.24.1, not 3.x.  (it does have
GTK+ 3.x and debugging symbols).

If you're still interested, start here for Debian: http://www.debian.org
and http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.html

I'm not sure which BSD John has worked the most on and thus would
recommend for an Ada programmer.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.