Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

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

I've just completed the task of updating the existing patches from GCC
4.1 to GCC 4.2.  These patches introduce libgnatvsn and libgnatprj,
and link gnatmake and friends dynamically rather than statically.
Now, the next task I've assigned myself is to build the
setjump/longjump version of libgnat in addition to the zero-cost
exception mechanism.  Would anyone be interested in participating?

I am planning to upload gnat-4.2 without SJLJ this weekend or early
next week, after today's upload of gcc-4.2 has been built on all
architectures.  I have not yet started work on SJLJ; that will come in
a future upload.  Help is appreciated to test GCC 4.2, build the SJLJ
version of the library, and move gnat-glade (the distributed systems)
to GCC 4.2 with SJLJ.

If you want to build gnat-4.2 for yourself, go to [1] and read the
files README.maintainers and TODO.

[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/gcccvs/branches/sid/gcc-4.2/?op=log&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1

GCC 4.2 is already the default Fortran compiler in Debian unstable.
The plan is to transition C and C++ packages to GCC 4.2 in the next
weeks [2], with the ultimate goal to use GCC 4.2 as the default
compiler for all languages except Java.

It is not yet known at this point whether GCC 4.3 will be released in
time for Lenny, the next stable version of Debian which is scheduled
for release in October 2008 (the toolchain freeze will take place 6
months prior to that).  So, I would like to complete a transition of
all Ada packages to 4.2 before considering 4.3.  That transition
requires that all items in the TODO list be completed first.

[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/06/msg00008.html

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.