Re: A proposal for Debian policy for Ada

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>> On Sun, 16 May 2010 22:48:19 +0200, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>>
>> 5.3.6 seems to refer to the Ada library being packaged. What I mean is a
>> way to reference to an external C library, e.g. libgdk_pixbuf in the
>> example.
>
> Ah, I had not caught that subtlety.  There are currently 2517 -dev
> packages in the libdevel section of Debian unstable.  Are you suggesting
> that each -dev package for the C language should provide a GNAT Project
> file?  

That would be the best thing for Ada users :). But then Perl, Python etc
would demand equal treatment.

> Or that each -dev package for an Ada library should provide an
> individual project file for each C library referenced? That seems like
> a *lot* of work.

Perhaps 'gcc -fdump-ada-spec' could be enhanced to generate the
corresponding gpr file (or maybe it does that already?).

>> project LIBRARY is
>>    type Library_Kind_Type is ("static", "relocatable");
>>    Library_Kind : Library_Kind_Type :=
>>       external ("Library_Type", "relocatable");
>>    for Library_Kind use Library_Kind;
>>    for Library_Name use "LIBRARY"; -- Valid for either choice
>>    for Library_Dir use "/usr/lib"; -- Valid for either choice
>>    ...
>>    for Externally_Built use "true";
>> end LIBRARY;
>
> That's a nice suggestion.  I'll try to implement that for the release
> after Squeeze.

We can do this now for individual packages; the only thing the policy
needs is a standard name for the "Library_Type" environment variable.

-- 
-- Stephe