Re: Latest GNAT version

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@tiscali.be>]

Björn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> writes:
> If ASIS and GLADE could be lifted out from this hypothetical new "p"
> release and used with GCC 4.x releases without a lot of patching
> . good. Otherwise I think it would be better . at least for us
> free software users . if ASIS and GLADE could be kept in sync
> with GCC, because it would be easier to get them into OS
> distributions that way.

I agree wholeheartedly.  The latest GNAT Pro 5.03 appears to be based
on GCC 3.4; if GNAT Pro comes with ASIS and GLADE, and if AdaCore made
a "p" release based on it, what a wonderful world this would be :)

> Redhat provides the Ada part of GCC in Fedora Core, but hardly any
> other Ada packages. The situation seems to be similar with
> Suse. I've been thinking that maybe I should learn RPM and make some
> Ada packages for Fedora Extras. ASIS would be a candidate but it
> would have to work with the GCC release selected for each release of
> Fedora Core.

To my knowledge, Debian is the only distribution that has a complete
Ada development environment, including a compiler, ASIS, GLADE,
several libraries, GPS, Ada-aware GDB, and a unifying policy to hold
them together.  This kind of thing takes a lot of work to achieve.  I
respect your desire to enhance Fedora or SuSE with such an
environment, but it would be easier for you to join me in Debian.
I've been asking for co-maintainers for a bout a year now.

> It's a great advantage to C, Perl, Python and other languages that
> they are so readily available in the free Unixoids. A complete
> development environment with lots of libraries can be installed with
> a single command, or is even installed by default. I want Ada to
> have the same advantage, and not just in Debian but in other
> distributions too. ASIS is a vital part. Even Gnat appears
> incomplete when the tools that depend on ASIS are missing. It would
> therefore be very good if there were an ASIS release that worked
> with recent GCC releases. (I suppose GLADE would also be good to
> have, although I personally don't have a use for it.)

It looks like GLADE is being replaced by PolyORB.  There have been
patches applied in GCC (>= 3.4) that add special compiler support for
it in GCC.  So, if Annex E is implemented by PolyORB instead of GLADE,
this is find by me.

I do hope that someone at AdaCore is listening :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.