Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Ludovic Brenta]

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.

Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Ludovic Brenta]

The transition of Debian to GCC 4.2 has started.  Debian Unstable
deserves its name.

Thanks to massive help from Xavier Grave, gnat-4.2 now provides a
version of the Ada run-time using the setjump/longjump exception
handling mechanism.  This new run-time library is only provided in
static form as an alternative to the existing zero-cost exception
handling mechanism, which is still provided as both static and shared
libraries.

The SJLJ version of the run-time is particularly important for Annex E
distributed systems.  In addition to his work on gnat-4.2, Xavier
Grave has also updated the gnat-glade package to version 2007, using
the SJLJ library.  His initial testing shows quite an improvement over
gnat-glade 2006 using the ZCX mechanism.  gnat-glade is almost ready
for upload but still needs a little polishing.  We will upload it in a
few days.

Before gnat-glade, I will upload a new and final gnat-4.1 which no
longer provides libgnatprj-dev or libgnatvsn-dev.  These packages are
now provided by gnat-4.2 instead.  Once that's done, a new upload of
gcc-defaults will make gnat-4.2 the new default compiler.

After that, I will update and re-upload all Ada packages over the
course of several months, as my free time permits.

I intend to work in roughly this order:

gnat-glade (upgrade to 2007 with SJLJ exceptions)
gnat-gdb (upgrade to 6.4+2007)
asis (upgrade to 2006 or 2007, whichever works best)
adacontrol (upgrade to 1.7)
libgtkada2 (upgrade to 2.10)
libtemplates-parser (upgrade to a recent CVS snapshot)
libxmlada2
gnat-gps
libaws
gnade
libflorist
libaunit
libopentoken
libtexttools

If you would like to help, please read this introduction:

English: http://www.ada-france.org/article131.html
French:  http://www.ada-france.org/article130.html

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Pascal Obry]

Ludovic,

> The SJLJ version of the run-time is particularly important for Annex E
> distributed systems. 

I'm using GLADE with ZCX without trouble since long time... So, just
curious, what is the relation between SJLJ and Annex-E ? What problem
did you have ?

> After that, I will update and re-upload all Ada packages over the
> course of several months, as my free time permits.
> 
> I intend to work in roughly this order:
> 
> gnat-glade (upgrade to 2007 with SJLJ exceptions)
> gnat-gdb (upgrade to 6.4+2007)
> asis (upgrade to 2006 or 2007, whichever works best)
> adacontrol (upgrade to 1.7)
> libgtkada2 (upgrade to 2.10)
> libtemplates-parser (upgrade to a recent CVS snapshot)

I bet you meant SVN snapshot here, right ?

> libxmlada2
> gnat-gps
> libaws

Will this be SVN too ? Also note that AWS comes with the
templates_parser engine, so above libtemplates-parser is the standalone
version, right?

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|              http://www.obry.net
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key C1082595

Re: Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Ludovic Brenta]

Pascal Obry writes:

> Ludovic,
>
>> The SJLJ version of the run-time is particularly important for Annex E
>> distributed systems. 
>
> I'm using GLADE with ZCX without trouble since long time... So, just
> curious, what is the relation between SJLJ and Annex-E ? What problem
> did you have ?

Xavier knows more about this.  It has to do with propagating
exceptions across partitions; the ZCX mechanism is apparently not
supported or very buggy.

>> After that, I will update and re-upload all Ada packages over the
>> course of several months, as my free time permits.
>> 
>> I intend to work in roughly this order:
>> 
>> gnat-glade (upgrade to 2007 with SJLJ exceptions)
>> gnat-gdb (upgrade to 6.4+2007)
>> asis (upgrade to 2006 or 2007, whichever works best)
>> adacontrol (upgrade to 1.7)
>> libgtkada2 (upgrade to 2.10)
>> libtemplates-parser (upgrade to a recent CVS snapshot)
>
> I bet you meant SVN snapshot here, right ?

No, I meant the CVS from libre.adacore.com.  Have they switched to
Subversion?  Or are you referring to your own repository?

>> libxmlada2
>> gnat-gps
>> libaws
>
> Will this be SVN too ? Also note that AWS comes with the
> templates_parser engine, so above libtemplates-parser is the
> standalone version, right?

In Etch, this is a snapshot of the standalone version which also works
with AWS and GPS; both use slightly different versions of it.  I
intend to do the same for Lenny.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Pascal Obry]

Ludovic,

> No, I meant the CVS from libre.adacore.com.  Have they switched to
> Subversion?  Or are you referring to your own repository?

Templates_Parser and AWS have been moved to Subversion on Libre site
since some time now. There is no more CVS repositories for those projects.

> In Etch, this is a snapshot of the standalone version which also works
> with AWS and GPS; both use slightly different versions of it.  I
> intend to do the same for Lenny.

Fine.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|              http://www.obry.net
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key C1082595

Re: Ada in Debian: transition to GCC 4.2

[Ludovic Brenta]

Pascal Obry writes:
> Ludovic,
>
>> No, I meant the CVS from libre.adacore.com.  Have they switched to
>> Subversion?  Or are you referring to your own repository?
>
> Templates_Parser and AWS have been moved to Subversion on Libre site
> since some time now. There is no more CVS repositories for those
> projects.

Thanks for the info; I had noticed that the CVS server was down last
week but not that you had moved some projects to Subversion.  Now I
see that AdaCore have in fact moved most of the projects to Subversion
(the only ones still in CVS seem to be GLADE and GDB).

This has allowed me to make a long-standing dream come true: I have
tailor'ed the full history into a Monotone database.  This db is
private for now, but I can merge it into the Ada-France database if
anyone is interested.

The down side is that the Subversion interface no longer allows me to
see the tags; this is a result of Subversion's broken working model
(tags are directories) and of the fact that the tags directory in the
AdaCore repo is private.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.