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From: Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Debian Family,  GNAT version map
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2012 08:05:11 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2012-08-19T08:05:11-07:00
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Hi Ludovic

I was hoping you would reply :)

So I did as you had suggested and ran dpkg -l gnat*.

I am on Xubuntu(I am planning on switching) and I got this:


:dpkg -l gnat*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
ii  gnat           4.6ubuntu1     GNU Ada compiler
un  gnat-3.1       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-3.2       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-3.3       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-3.4       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-3.5       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.0       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.1       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.2       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.3       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.4       <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.4-base  <none>         (no description available)
ii  gnat-4.6       4.6.3-1ubuntu4 GNU Ada compiler
ii  gnat-4.6-base  4.6.3-1ubuntu4 GNU Ada compiler (common files)
un  gnat-4.6-doc   <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-4.6-sjlj  <none>         (no description available)
un  gnat-doc       <none>         (no description available)
ii  gnat-gps       5.0-6          integrated development environment for C and
ii  gnat-gps-commo 5.0-6          integrated development environment for C and
ii  gnat-gps-doc   5.0-6          integrated development environment for C and


The part here that worries me is the 4.6.3-1ubuntu4 portion. I am guessing other downstream Debian derivatives do not just take the prebuilt "debian-debian" binaries wholesale but instead recompile the sources again.

It may be hard to know if the package is now the same as the 4.6.3 Debian version. If the packager had trouble with something they could modify something and introduce bugs.

Do you have any suggestions on how to track combat version skewing or is this largely a non-issue?

It would be pretty easy for me to set up a bunch of distros under VirtualBox and then run dpkg -l gnat* on them but I guess it may not be that easy...