GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Adrian Hoe]

Hi,

I have been using SuSE Linux all the time and I am tired of SuSE's
broken online updates which frequently crashed and hang my systems.
This happened again 2 days ago after I performed online update to some
systems both in my office and home. I have been testing Debian on two
of my machines at work and both run very stable without reboot. The
online update using apt-get was very stable indeed.

One advantage of Debian is that one can easily perform a version update
using apt-get. A version update on SuSE is a little tricky and
troublesome.

I am thinking of switching to Debian or Gentoo. Does anyone have any
experience developing Ada applications on both Debian and Gentoo Linux?

I read some unfavored comments on Gentoo regarding outdated emerge on
gnat and Ada related packages. On the other hand, I have heard many
good comments about developing Ada applications on both Debian and
Gentoo. I have also read and heard about developing Ada applications on
SuSE.

I am a little confused and eagerly to move away from SuSE or I should
stay with SuSE.

Can someone shine some light of wisdom on me?

Thanks and best regards,
--
Adrian Hoe
http://adrianhoe.net

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Alex R. Mosteo]

Adrian Hoe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been using SuSE Linux all the time and I am tired of SuSE's
> broken online updates which frequently crashed and hang my systems.
> This happened again 2 days ago after I performed online update to some
> systems both in my office and home. I have been testing Debian on two
> of my machines at work and both run very stable without reboot. The
> online update using apt-get was very stable indeed.
> 
> One advantage of Debian is that one can easily perform a version update
> using apt-get. A version update on SuSE is a little tricky and
> troublesome.
> 
> I am thinking of switching to Debian or Gentoo. Does anyone have any
> experience developing Ada applications on both Debian and Gentoo Linux?
> 
> I read some unfavored comments on Gentoo regarding outdated emerge on
> gnat and Ada related packages. On the other hand, I have heard many
> good comments about developing Ada applications on both Debian and
> Gentoo. I have also read and heard about developing Ada applications on
> SuSE.
> 
> I am a little confused and eagerly to move away from SuSE or I should
> stay with SuSE.
> 
> Can someone shine some light of wisdom on me?

I'm sure other people will have things to add, but in debian you have a 
commited maintainer (I think it's Ludovic Brenta) which actively keeps 
the Ada packages tuned. If I were in your situation I'd go for debian 
because of this.

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have been using SuSE Linux all the time and I am tired of SuSE's
> broken online updates which frequently crashed and hang my systems.
> This happened again 2 days ago after I performed online update to some
> systems both in my office and home. I have been testing Debian on two
> of my machines at work and both run very stable without reboot. The
> online update using apt-get was very stable indeed.
> 
> One advantage of Debian is that one can easily perform a version update
> using apt-get. A version update on SuSE is a little tricky and
> troublesome.
> 
> I am thinking of switching to Debian or Gentoo. Does anyone have any
> experience developing Ada applications on both Debian and Gentoo Linux?
> 
> I read some unfavored comments on Gentoo regarding outdated emerge on
> gnat and Ada related packages. On the other hand, I have heard many
> good comments about developing Ada applications on both Debian and
> Gentoo. I have also read and heard about developing Ada applications on
> SuSE.
> 
> I am a little confused and eagerly to move away from SuSE or I should
> stay with SuSE.
> 
> Can someone shine some light of wisdom on me?

I use GNAT on Gentoo.  I set flags to let me use the most recent stuff
available (kind of like using Debian Unstable), and I get the GNAT 3.4.5
that's built on GCC 3.4.5.

-- 
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Jeffrey Creem]

Adrian Hoe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been using SuSE Linux all the time and I am tired of SuSE's
> broken online updates which frequently crashed and hang my systems.
> This happened again 2 days ago after I performed online update to some
> systems both in my office and home. I have been testing Debian on two
> of my machines at work and both run very stable without reboot. The
> online update using apt-get was very stable indeed.
> 
> One advantage of Debian is that one can easily perform a version update
> using apt-get. A version update on SuSE is a little tricky and
> troublesome.
> 
> I am thinking of switching to Debian or Gentoo. Does anyone have any
> experience developing Ada applications on both Debian and Gentoo Linux?
> 
> I read some unfavored comments on Gentoo regarding outdated emerge on
> gnat and Ada related packages. On the other hand, I have heard many
> good comments about developing Ada applications on both Debian and
> Gentoo. I have also read and heard about developing Ada applications on
> SuSE.
> 
> I am a little confused and eagerly to move away from SuSE or I should
> stay with SuSE.
> 
> Can someone shine some light of wisdom on me?
> 
> Thanks and best regards,
> --
> Adrian Hoe
> http://adrianhoe.net
> 


Since a lot of the commercial companies (at least in the US) that claim 
to support Linux target Red hat as the primary (or only) Linux, we tend 
to use it at work when we use Linux.

So, for home use, I decided to go with Centos (www.centos.org) which 
attempts to be very close to red hat releases with the changes being 
generally limited to staying in compliance with the Red hat Trademark 
guidelines.

I have successfully upgraded OS versions with yum under Centos.

Note that even for normal updates, I have been mildly burned by yum 
updates. The biggest problem has been things like php library changes 
that I update and then don't reboot. When I finally reboot for other 
reasons 3 months later and my website stops working, it has taken as 
long 10-15 minutes to figure out what I broke.

Centos is not the "best" Linux around and I would not claim anything 
like the level of support for Ada that Debian currently has but it 
probably deserves a spot in the trade space.

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Adrian Hoe]

How about gcc/gnat 4.x? Linux distros are quite slow in this. Most of
4.x is in unstable production.

Blastwave.org(Solaris) and macada.org (Apple Mac OS X) have rolled out
4.x. Sometimes I find that it is difficult to keep abreast.

One of my recent concern is that I got a compiler error from gnat 3.3.3
and 3.4.x on SuSE. There is no problem at all on 4.0.2 on Solaris. I
can't find 3.4.5 update for SuSE 9.1 and I think SuSE is not going to
maintain any updates for 9.1. There is no aparent reason for them to do
ssince they have rolled out 10 and soon 10.1 and 10.2. The ony option
is to upgrade to SuSE 9.3 or 10. The upgrade is almost like a full
installation. My upgrade from SuSE 8.2 to 9.1 was a painful one. It's a
nightmare to uprade 4 machines (mine, does not includes others) at work
and 3 at home!
-- 
Adrian Hoe
http://adrianhoe.net

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Adrian Hoe]

What I want is easy updates of software packages and kernel without
going through hassle installation/upgrade.

Centos is lovely but it is SuSE-like, a "CD"-based rather than source
(Gentoo) and binary (Debian) -based. Both Gentoo and Debian allow to
download specific software packages to update.

Another lovely distro is Ubuntu. Like Centos, it is very nice to run as
"ordinary" home or business environment but not for development,
especially, serious Ada applications development.

I can't seem to decide between Debian and Gentoo....
--
Adrian Hoe
http://adrianhoe.net

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Pascal Obry]

Adrian Hoe a �crit :

> I can't seem to decide between Debian and Gentoo....

Then you want Debian, Ludovic Brenta is doing quite a nice work for Ada
on this distrib.

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: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Ludovic Brenta]

Thanks, Alex and Pascal.

With Debian you can choose between Stable, Testing and Unstable.

Stable deserves its name.  The latest release is Debian 3.1 "Sarge".
It contains One... Million... Lines of Ada, properly compiled and
packaged and easy to install as binary packages.  This is a complete
Ada platform, suitable for development and deployment (i.e. you can
make your own packages based on it).  This platform is based on gnat
3.15p with ASIS, GLADE and Florist, and supports i386, powerpc, and
sparc.  In addition, the package `gnat-3.4' is available, but
unsupported.

The next stable release of Debian is scheduled for December 2006.  Its
code name is Etch.  Etch is today in "testing" state; it changes every
day as new packages migrate from "unstable" to "testing".  The Ada
platform is currently the same as in Sarge, but it now supports
kfreebsd-i386 (GNU/kFreeBSD) too.  gnat-3.4 has been removed, gnat-4.0
has been added but is not supported.

There is a plan to migrate the whole platform to GCC 4.1 before Etch
is released.  I have already started the ground work for this, and
will keep you posted on progress if you like.  The transition will
bring support for Ada 2005, amd64, ppc64, sparc64, hppa, hppa64, and
biarch (i386-amd64, powerpc-ppc64, sparc-sparc64, hppa-hppa64).  One
large piece of work that awaits me is porting ASIS and GLADE to GCC
4.1.  This will be a big-bang transition, because the ABI change
requires recompiling all packages and changing the sonames of all
libraries.  But I will make sure that upgrading "Sarge" to "Etch" will
be as simple as "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade".

If you want to see this transition in progress and participate in it,
you need to use "unstable" plus the gcc-4.1 package from
"experimental".  I'll also need a lot of help from people with 64-bit
hardware, and to make biarch work properly.

Full details are in the Debian Policy for Ada, of which I just
published the second edition:

http://www.ada-france.org/debian/debian-ada-policy.html

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:

> How about gcc/gnat 4.x?

Should be a simple matter of hacking an ebuild.

Is there any reason I would want to do that?  What's new between 3.4.x
and 4.x?

-- 
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Alex R. Mosteo]

Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>How about gcc/gnat 4.x?
> 
> 
> Should be a simple matter of hacking an ebuild.
> 
> Is there any reason I would want to do that?  What's new between 3.4.x
> and 4.x?

Most evident changes would be in Ada05 support, which is being added. 
I'm aware of several bugfixes in that regard and I've already seen a new 
error message (for something that previously went undetected).

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Martin Krischik]

Bobby D. Bryant wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> How about gcc/gnat 4.x?
> 
> Should be a simple matter of hacking an ebuild.
> 
> Is there any reason I would want to do that?  What's new between 3.4.x
> and 4.x?

Ada 2005.

Martin
-- 
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, "Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com> wrote:

> Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> How about gcc/gnat 4.x?
>> 
>> Should be a simple matter of hacking an ebuild.
>> 
>> Is there any reason I would want to do that?  What's new between 3.4.x
>> and 4.x?
> 
> Most evident changes would be in Ada05 support

Thanks.  I guess it's about time to take that plunge...

-- 
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Alex R. Mosteo]

Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, "Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, "Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>How about gcc/gnat 4.x?
>>>
>>>Should be a simple matter of hacking an ebuild.
>>>
>>>Is there any reason I would want to do that?  What's new between 3.4.x
>>>and 4.x?
>>
>>Most evident changes would be in Ada05 support
> 
> Thanks.  I guess it's about time to take that plunge...

Be warned that the thing is somewhat buggy, at least in the latest 
GAP/GPL release. That said, once you get the grasp of what works and 
what not, you can start to use some useful 2005 features.

I guess that gcc 4.1 can be a goop step forward in that respect, since 
some things that are improved over GAP/GPL (this is hearsay) are 
"limited with", anonymous access type record members, proper 
initialization of default box notation with controlled types, dot 
notation; all of them features that I find pretty useful. But then, I 
have GAP support so I want to continue using that release, even if it's 
less functional.

If you're interested in some particular 2005 feature you can ask me and 
I can tell you my experience (if I've tried it, of course) with the 
GAP/GPL releases. (I believe they're equivalent, except for the support).

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Adrian Hoe]

That sounds promising. I have run tests on a Debian (Sarge) machine and
I intend to overwrite another Debian machine with Gentoo so that I can
compare both.

I am also interested in amd64. My company is planning to move some
development to amd64 some late 2006.

To satisfy curiosity, what exactly " It contains One... Million...
Lines of Ada, properly compiled and packaged and easy to install as
binary packages."? Is it gnat or other software packages?
--
Adrian Hoe
http://adrianhoe.net

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Adrian Hoe]

I got the following GNAT bug compiling my applications:

gcc -c -I/usr/lib/ada/floristlib -I../charles/src
-I/usr/local/include/gtkada dlg_about_pkg-callbacks.adb
+===========================GNAT BUG
DETECTED==============================+
| 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux) (i586-suse-linux-gnu) Assert_Failure
nlists.adb:836   |
| Error detected at
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-suse-linux/3.3.3/adainclude/s-finimp.ads:37:1|
|

I could not trace the origin of the bug. Downgrading gnat is not
possible. I hope 3.4 or 4.x can solve my problem. I get 3.4 and 4.x,
the only option is to upgrade to SuSE 10. That's one of the critical
reason I want to move away from SuSE.

If Debian can allow me to install unstable or testing release of gnat,
I will definitely consider Debian to be our main development/test
platform.

Also, is it possible to install more than 1 release of gcc/gnat and
switch among the release?

For example, to switch to 3.4:

sudo gcc_select 3.4

I can't find gcc_select in Debian.
--
Adrian Hoe
http://adrianhoe.net

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Ludovic Brenta]

"Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> writes:

> That sounds promising. I have run tests on a Debian (Sarge) machine and
> I intend to overwrite another Debian machine with Gentoo so that I can
> compare both.
>
> I am also interested in amd64. My company is planning to move some
> development to amd64 some late 2006.
>
> To satisfy curiosity, what exactly " It contains One... Million...
> Lines of Ada, properly compiled and packaged and easy to install as
> binary packages."? Is it gnat or other software packages?

The packages I maintain total a little over 1 million lines of Ada, as
per SLOCCount; i.e. not including blank lines or comments, and not
including other languages like C or Makefile.  The largest packages
are gnat and GPS (300 kSLOC each), GtkAda (90 kSLOC), ASIS (85 kSLOC),
GLADE (78 kSLOC), AWS (55 kSLOC), etc.

In addition, gnat-3.3 and gnat-3.4 contain some 700 kSLOC which I have
not counted in the "one million" figure, because I don't support these
versions of GNAT.

Full details are here:

http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/debian-counting/sarge/

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Ludovic Brenta]

Adrian Hoe writes:
> I got the following GNAT bug compiling my applications:
>
> gcc -c -I/usr/lib/ada/floristlib -I../charles/src
> -I/usr/local/include/gtkada dlg_about_pkg-callbacks.adb
> +===========================GNAT BUG DETECTED==============================+
> | 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux) (i586-suse-linux-gnu) Assert_Failure nlists.adb:836   |
> | Error detected at /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-suse-linux/3.3.3/adainclude/s-finimp.ads:37:1|
> |
>
> I could not trace the origin of the bug. Downgrading gnat is not
> possible. I hope 3.4 or 4.x can solve my problem. I get 3.4 and 4.x,
> the only option is to upgrade to SuSE 10. That's one of the critical
> reason I want to move away from SuSE.

The Ada front-end in GCC 3.3 is pretty much the same as in 3.2 and
3.1, and is buggy because of the move from the GCC 2.8 backend to the
GCC 3.x backend.

GCC 3.4 should be okay.

GCC 4.0 has the same problem again, due to the new Tree-SSA backend.

GCC 4.1 should be okay.

> If Debian can allow me to install unstable or testing release of
> gnat, I will definitely consider Debian to be our main
> development/test platform.

Your decision boils down to this: do you want to

(a) develop/test your programs on a stable platform, or

(b) develop/test GNAT on an unstable platform (unstable because GNAT
is part of the platform)?

If you answer (a), then Debian 3.1 "Sarge" (stable) is for you.
Debian is the only distribution that provides a stable platform for
Ada development and deployment.  My goal as a Debian maintainer is to
address the needs of people who answer (a).

If you answer (b), then there are several ways in which you can
contribute to GNAT development.  The most obvious one is to check out
the latest sources of GCC from the Subversion repository at
gcc.gnu.org, and compile them for yourself.  You can do this on any
distribution, so you can keep SuSE.

Or, you can install the package gnat-4.1 on top of Debian "Sid"
(unstable).  Then you will be able to contribute to the very
interesting transition to gnat-4.1 as the default Ada compiler for
Debian.  The ground work I'm currently doing involves patching GCC's
configure and build scripts, as well as the Ada front-end.  If that
sounds interesting to you, then please join in!

> Also, is it possible to install more than 1 release of gcc/gnat and
> switch among the release?

Possible, yes.  Easy, no.

As a consequence of my goal of providing a stable Ada platform, I have
decided to support only one version of GNAT at a time, but to support
it well.  The packages gnat, gnat-3.3, gnat-3.4, gnat-4.0 and gnat-4.1
conflict with each other.  If you want to install several of them in
parallel, you need to use either full-blown chroots, or install with
"dpkg --root" and use $PATH and "gcc -B".  I personally have a chroot
where I work on gnat-4.1, while my main installation has gnat
installed.

Here is a little summary of which versions of gnat are available in
which versions of Debian:

Sarge (stable): gnat, gnat-3.3, gnat-3.4
Etch (testing): gnat, gnat-4.0
Sid (unstable): gnat, gnat-4.0
experimental: gnat-4.1

"experimental" is not a full version of Debian; it is a small number
of packages that you must install on top of Sid.

The only supported version is gnat.  All the others are for
experimentation only.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Ludovic Brenta]

"Adrian Hoe" <abyhoe@gmail.com> writes:
> I am also interested in amd64. My company is planning to move some
> development to amd64 some late 2006.

That's not supported at the moment, but will be after the transition
to gnat-4.1.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.