Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Thanks, Alex and Pascal.

With Debian you can choose between Stable, Testing and Unstable.

Stable deserves its name.  The latest release is Debian 3.1 "Sarge".
It contains One... Million... Lines of Ada, properly compiled and
packaged and easy to install as binary packages.  This is a complete
Ada platform, suitable for development and deployment (i.e. you can
make your own packages based on it).  This platform is based on gnat
3.15p with ASIS, GLADE and Florist, and supports i386, powerpc, and
sparc.  In addition, the package `gnat-3.4' is available, but
unsupported.

The next stable release of Debian is scheduled for December 2006.  Its
code name is Etch.  Etch is today in "testing" state; it changes every
day as new packages migrate from "unstable" to "testing".  The Ada
platform is currently the same as in Sarge, but it now supports
kfreebsd-i386 (GNU/kFreeBSD) too.  gnat-3.4 has been removed, gnat-4.0
has been added but is not supported.

There is a plan to migrate the whole platform to GCC 4.1 before Etch
is released.  I have already started the ground work for this, and
will keep you posted on progress if you like.  The transition will
bring support for Ada 2005, amd64, ppc64, sparc64, hppa, hppa64, and
biarch (i386-amd64, powerpc-ppc64, sparc-sparc64, hppa-hppa64).  One
large piece of work that awaits me is porting ASIS and GLADE to GCC
4.1.  This will be a big-bang transition, because the ABI change
requires recompiling all packages and changing the sonames of all
libraries.  But I will make sure that upgrading "Sarge" to "Etch" will
be as simple as "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade".

If you want to see this transition in progress and participate in it,
you need to use "unstable" plus the gcc-4.1 package from
"experimental".  I'll also need a lot of help from people with 64-bit
hardware, and to make biarch work properly.

Full details are in the Debian Policy for Ada, of which I just
published the second edition:

http://www.ada-france.org/debian/debian-ada-policy.html

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.