The Story of My Life so Far - Part 126 - gpr2make, gprmake and gprbuild

This is the story of my life so far: 69 years and counting.
Prequel: A Brief History of my Family in France

The story starts here
Previous episode: Part 125

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In 2004, AdaCore was in fact two companies: Ada Core Technologies Inc. in North America (New York) and ACT Europe Ltd in Europe (Paris). I was a full time consultant (not an employee) of the American company, but I worked mostly with the French people.

In 2004, when I said that "gpr2make", the "Make file builder" that we were using for multi-language applications, was not the way to go, my usual interlocutors in Paris, including the guy who created gpr2make and Cyrille Comar, the boss of the French company did not agree with me.
Their arguments were that gpr2make was working pretty well and that developing a new tool would take a long time (18 months) to be at the same level as gpr2make.

After I tested locally the critical part of the new tool I was proposing, gprmake, I replied that it would take me only three weeks to be at the same level as gpr2make.
gprmake would still invoke gnatmake, our Ada only builder, for the Ada part of a multi language application.

All our discussions were done through e-mail and broadcasted to all the technical people in both companies.

In New York, Robert Dewar, the boss of the American company, was following these discussions and saw that there was a major disagreement between myself and the French squad.
On the occasion of a New York visit by Cyrille Comar, Robert Dewar told me to come to New York and we would have a meeting about gpr2make and gprmake.

In the beginning of the meeting, Cyrille explained that gpr2make was a Make file builder and immediately Robert replied that the semantic of Makefiles was not well defined at all. When I heard that, I immediately knew that I will be able to create gprmake, and indeed that what happened. Less than three weeks later, I made the first internal release of gprmake, and not too long after it was released to our customers.

As I said before, gprmake was still using gnatmake for the Ada part.
Several years after, AdaCore decided that we should have a new version of gprmake that would be independent from gnatmake and do the building jobs for all languages.
This new version, that I also created initially, was given the name of "gprbuild", and is still in use today, while gpr2make and gprmake have been abandoned.

Continue to Part 127

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Summary
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15 - Part 16
Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24
Part 25 - Part 26 - Part 27 - Part 28 - Part 29 - Part 30 - Part 31 - Part 32
Part 33 - Part 34 - Part 35 - Part 36 - Part 37 - Part 38 - Part 39 - Part 40
Part 41 - Part 42 - Part 43 - Part 44 - Part 45 - Part 46 - Part 47 - Part 48
Part 49 - Part 50 - Part 51 - Part 52 - Part 53 - Part 54 - Part 55 - Part 56
Part 57 - Part 58 - Part 59 - Part 60 - Part 61 - Part 62 - Part 63 - Part 64
Part 65 - Part 66 - Part 67 - Part 68 - Part 69 - Part 70 - Part 71 - Part 72
Part 73 - Part 74 - Part 75 - Part 76 - Part 77 - Part 78 - Part 79 - Part 80
Part 81 - Part 82 - Part 83 - Part 84 - Part 85 - Part 86 - Part 87 - Part 88
Part 89 - Part 90 - Part 91 - Part 92 - Part 93 - Part 94 - Part 95 - Part 96
Part 97 - Part 98 - Part 99 - Part 100 - Part 101 - Part 102 - Part 103
Part 104 - Part 105 - Part 106 - Part 107 - Part 108 - Part 109 - Part 110
Part 111 - Part 112 - Part 113 - Part 114 - Part 115 - Part 116 - Part 117
Part 118 - Part 119 - Part 120 - Part 121 - Part 122 - Part 123 - Part 124
Part 125