Re: [gnuada] gcc 4.1.0 available

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

"Dr. Adrian Wrigley" <amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk.uk.uk> writes:
> I had tried Debian, knowing that Ludovic Brenta was doing great work
> on GNAT support in Debian.  But I didn't get on very well with
> Sarge, lacking hardware support and multi-arch.  I wasn't sure if I
> could run the 32-bit applications on it properly.

As far as I can tell, multiarch support is immature in all
distributions.  Work is ongoing in Debian to provide good multiarch
support, but currently we're restricted to biarch support on some
architecture pairs (i386-amd64, powerpc-ppc64, and sparc-sparc64).
I'm not actually that knowledgeable about biarch myself.  The
technicalities are already complex enough, but there are policy
decisions to be made as well.  Apparently, we're looking at
generalising the toolchain, libraries, filesystem hierarchy, dynamic
loader, package manager (dpkg), and I've probably forgotten some other
things.

That said, have you looked at http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/  ?

Yes, you can run 32-bit applications on it.  In the worst case, you
can always create a chroot containing a complete 32-bit userland
running on top of a 64-bit system.  But as I said, Debian developers
are looking for ways to provide that out of the box.

If you want to do Ada on amd64 with Sarge, you need to use gnat-3.4
instead of gnat.  In Etch, you get gnat-4.0 instead.  I'm now working
on providing gnat-4.1, which, when it stabilises, will become the
default compiler for Ada 2005, C, C++, Fortran 95, Java, Objective C,
and Objective C++.

> Suse seemed very promising, and your creation of a complete
> set of GNAT packages makes it quite attractive.  Perhaps this
> is what I should use?

I don't follow SuSE development, but I am under the impression that
its otherwise good support for amd64 is uniarch only, i.e. support for
32-bit binaries is immature.  Perhaps Martin can confirm or deny.

> As regards Annex E, I am still stuck with the version of Glade
> that goes with GNAT 3.15p, and there appears to be a nasty bug
> which I hit occasionally.  I had got the impression that
> Glade development had halted in favour of PolyOrb.  Which of
> these should I be using?  I guess I should stick with Glade 
> if that is what you have packaged!

You can download recent sources of GLADE from AdaCore's CVS
repository[1].  I see there is activity there, the most recent file
was modified 6 days ago.  The change seems to be related to 64-bit
architectures.

[1] https://libre2.adacore.com/cvsweb

It is my intention to take these sources and port them to GCC 4.1.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.