Re: Problem in debugging GPS

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

Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
>> I modified GPS to work with gcc 4.1.1. using gcc 4.1.1
>
> Great - I did not get that far. How about joining The GNU Ada
> Project [1] and share your patches with the rest of us? We alwas
> welcome new maintainers and if you got the GPS to compile you
> certainly are our man.
>
> Martin
>
> [1] http://gnuada.sf.net

If you like, I can send you my changes.  I've not only added a patch
to the GPS sources themselves, but I've also rewritten the build
machinery in a drastically simplistic way, consisting of *one*
Makefile (the famous debian/rules) and *one* GNAT project file.  This
comes at the expense of some flexibility; these scripts are designed
to work on Debian and only on Debian.

I also make heavy use of shared libraries.  My GPS uses not only
libgtkada.so.2.8.1, but also libtemplates_parser.so.10,
libgnatvsn.so.4.1, libgnatprj.so.4.1, and libpython2.4.so.1 (yes,
Python is enabled in the Debian build, even in GPS 2.1.0).  Thus, I
completely avoid the code duplication that AdaCore seem so fond of.
Even then, it takes 2h40 to compile GPS on my laptop, compared to 1
hour for GPS 2.1.0.  Part of the increase comes from GPS itself, and
part from the compiler, as GCC 4.1.1 is noticeably slower and more
memory-hungry than GNAT 3.15p.

The patches, on the other hand, are not specific to Debian, so you
could try them if you like.  They apply cleanly on the pristine
sources for GPS 4.0.0, and are managed with quilt.  It is also very
easy to apply them manually if you just read the short file,
patches/series.  The patch "gcc-4.1.patch" in which you are interested
is a mere 269 lines long.

The down side is that, as I said, GPS crashes when it opens a "file
open" dialog.  The problem looks like a stack overflow in GTK+, but
I'm not sure.  I recompiled with -O0 but got the same results.  -O0
-fstack-check fared no better.  I still don't know if it's a compiler
bug or a GPS bug.  Since testgtk works correctly, I don't think it is
a GtkAda or GTK+ bug.

You can get the Debian scripts and patches from my Monotone server on
Ada-France, if you want.  The reasons why I did not join the GNU Ada
project on SourceForge are because (a) I dislike Subversion, (b) the
Debian patches are older and much more extensive than the ones you
have, and (c) the build machineries mandated by the package managers
(RPM vs. DPKG) are radically different; so, merging the Debian patches
and GNU Ada would be quite a lot of work.  I'm not against it, though.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.