Re: A bug in gnat/gcc 3.3.3?

[Martin Krischik <martin@krischik.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> Martin Krischik writes:
>> Compiling ASIS and GLADE for a newer version isn't that difficult -
>> even SuSE managed that for SuSE 9.2 - including x86_64
>> architecture. On the down side SuSE only supplies 3.3.4 which is not
>> that helpfull :-( .
> 
> If that is true, I am interested.

It is indeed (from SuSE 9.2 Professional/German/x86_64):
----
gnat-runtime - GNU Ada-Laufzeitbibliotheken


Dieses Paket enthï¿œlt die benï¿œtigten Shared Libraries zum Ausfï¿œhren von
Programmen, die mit dem GNU Ada-Compiler (GNAT) kompiliert wurden,
vorausgesetzt sie wurden zur Verwendung von Shared Libraries kompiliert. Es
enthï¿œlt weiterhin die Shared Libraries zur Implementation der Ada Semantic
Interface Specification (ASIS), der Distributed Systems Programming (GLADE)
sowie von Posix 1003.5 Binding (Florist). 
----
gnat-runtime-32bit - GNU Ada-Laufzeitbibliotheken


Dieses Paket enthï¿œlt die benï¿œtigten Shared Libraries zum Ausfï¿œhren von
Programmen, die mit dem GNU Ada-Compiler (GNAT) kompiliert wurden,
vorausgesetzt sie wurden zur Verwendung von Shared Libraries kompiliert. Es
enthï¿œlt weiterhin die Shared Libraries zur Implementation der Ada Semantic
Interface Specification (ASIS), der Distributed Systems Programming (GLADE)
sowie von Posix 1003.5 Binding (Florist). ----
----

> But my understanding is that both 
> are coupled with the internals of GNAT (with good reason, of course,
> considering what they do). 

They are indeed. But is is a simple matter of a copy or a symbolic link to
the original sources. The only real problem are the warning levels. AdaCore
uses -gnate and newer compilers have more warnings. You just have to
disable that.


> Several people on this newsgroup have been 
> harping on GCC 3.4, but I'd like reports about ASIS and GLADE for GCC
> 3.4.

ASIS: works fine with 3.4.3.
Florist compiles Ok.
GLADE compiles Ok. But some GCC versions have a broken -gnatze - so you
can't do anything with it.

> As a distribution maintainer, I also have configuration management
> issues in mind.  Ada Core is not doing any formal releases of ASIS or
> GLADE for GCC 3.4.  If I were to roll my own snapshot of the CVS  
> repositories and distribute them,

Only GLADE has a cvs snapshot:

:pserver:anoncvs@libre.act-europe.fr:/anoncvs/GLADE

For ASIS and Florist you need to patch the 3.15p sources. But that has been
done before.

> I would be taking quite a big 
> responsibility both to the users (who tend to trust Debian packages),
> and to Debian (which has a reputation for quality).  CVS snapshots
> would be okay for the "experimental" branch of Debian, but not, IMHO,
> for "stable".  I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise by people willing
> to contribute some time and energy.

I mentioned before that I did take a head start here:

http://gnat-asis.sourceforge.net/
http://gnat-florist.sourceforge.net/
http://gnat-glade.sourceforge.net/

I take on anyone who want to maintain something ;-) .

> More generally, it seems to me that many people on this newsgroup like
> to take their own snapshot of this, patch it, and then mix it with
> their neibour's snapshot of that.  This is called chaos, and it works
> because the software produced is often excellent.  But the resulting
> source packages are bound to require different versions of GNAT, and
> the only way to make them agree on one compiler is to use force
> (i.e. patch until the damn things will compile, because the upstream
> authors won't do it for you).  As a distribution maintainer and as one
> who has compiled many free Ada packages, I am extremely sensitive to
> this issue.

Shure. I just published my patches - but debian is different in that
resprect.

>> Besides: GCC 3.4 has PolyORB which seems the better option anyway.
> 
> This statement is not true.  GCC 3.4 does not "have" PolyORB, they are
> two separate packages.

Sorry, used the wrong wording.

> However, PolyORB is slated to replace GLADE in the future.  Parts of
> it are being merged into GCC 4.0, so in the future you will be able to
> say "PolyORB requires GCC 4.0 to build, and GCC 4.0 has special
> support for PolyORB".

Did not know that.
 
> Is anyone aware of a binary distribution of PolyORB?

No, PolyORB is source only. And currently DLL support is broken. And Windows
as well - some comandlines hit the 8192 character mark - does anybody know
a way around that? 

Apart from that PolyORB is quite cool. I tried ORBit as well but dropped it
very quickly. I rather use PolyORB and pragma Export (C,...) then ORBit's C
bindings.

With Regards

Martin
-- 
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