Re: GNADE still alive?

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

Thomas Løcke wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> GNADE is mature and stable and it has the advantage of being available
>> as a precompiled binary package, with long-term support, in Debian. Other
>> solutions require you to compile them yourself.
> 
> GNADE appears pretty dead, at least as far as updates to the code goes,
> unless of course I'm looking in all the wrong places...  :o)

Ada appears dead to quite a few people, too, but it's still working very
well, thank you very much.

The truth is, Free Software never dies.  GNADE may not have received much
love in the past few years but it is the basis of GNATCOLL and the sources
live on :)  For that matter, it would be nice if someone would invest a few
dozen man-hours in packaging GNATCOLL for Debian, see
http://bugs.debian.org/640532.

> Is the Debian package build using the vanilla sources from the project
> website, or do you guys add some of your own magic sauce?

Only a little fairy dust to make the package compliant to the Debian Policy
for Ada.  We did make some changes that we contributed upstream.  Stephe
may have more to say about this.

> GNADE might be the best thing since sliced bread, but looking at it
> from the outside, it sure do appears to be somewhat stale.

The MySQL and PostgreSQL parts of GNADE are definitely stale and not
in the binary packages in Debian.  The ODBC and SQLite bindings work
and will only become stale when the ODBC or SQLite break backward
compatibility.

Note: I am not an author of GNADE, I handed over maintenance of the
Debian package to Stephe years ago and I have no interest in promoting
GNADE over other solutions.  I'm only providing information that might
be relevant for the OP.  As you know, I am of the opinion that
binary packaging matters a lot, especially to beginners and professionals,
maybe less to enthusiasts who like to recompile everything for themselves.

BTW, there is also APQ in Debian but it only has a PostgreSQL binding
(not stale) at the moment, so I didn't mention it at first.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.