Re: Popularizing Ada

[William Starner <billeug@worldnet.att.net>]

Weston T. Pan wrote:
> 
> Rob Veenker wrote:
> >
> > I always wondered why Ada is not present on the many Linux distributions.
> > (At least I couldn't find them)
> > Most of the GNU-ware is present; why not Ada ? (GNAT)
> > Maybe its too obvious ?

Debian includes it, because Debian includes anything there's a developer for and
a free license. Debian's GNAT fixed the problem of the conflict between EGCS and
GCC 2.8.1 by calling GNAT's gcc gnatgcc. This is why Ada packages that Autoconf
often check for gnatgcc.
> 
> Well, this is the response I got from the author of Slackware :
> 
> [Begin quote]
> 
> Well, I've included gnat in the past, but don't think I'll consider it
> again unless it's merged as part of the egcs project.  It ended up being
> quite a headache, since gnat releases could take quite a while to come
> out
> after a new gcc release, and it was just a bit too much to deal with as
> a
> set of outside patches.  Hopefully they'll get together with the egcs
> project.  If that's not possible, I'd also consider including it if it
> could be reworked as a compiler with it's own backend, and didn't
> require
> modifying the C compiler;  but, I don't see that happening soon.

Hmm. Does he include GNU Pascal? That compiles against EGCS but is still an
independent package with its own release dates. Neither GPC or GNAT (with any
available patches) compile against GCC 2.95 (release date July 1), unfortunetly.