Re: Debian Family, GNAT version map

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

Patrick writes:
> Hi Ludovic
>
> WOW! this reallllly sucks. Your hard work is not being propagated down
> stream then.

That's not what I meant.  My hard work does propagate into all
derivatives; but this happens at the derivatives' discretion and with
their timing, not mine.  I also stated that bug fixes appear in Debian
first.

> I like Debain stable but unfortunately I only spend < 1% of my time
> with Ada and have to think about other issues. I had some trouble
> migrating emails to Debian-Debian and a bunch of other little things
> that are totally off topic.
>
> Some downstream distros offer other things. I like Trisquel for
> instance. It a free-to-the-Nth-degree distro. They have no binary
> blobs in the kernel and many other things like flash are removed.

Debian does the same; the non-free blobs are separate, not available by
default and not included in the installation CDs but one can choose to
use them.

> Unfortunately gnat + gcc are pretty old and pretty screwed and I
> encountered bugs I wouldn't have had an issue with on Debian stable.
>
> I wonder if there is a test suite to run on all the gnat* packages? I
> could run it. I know VirtualBox is heavy but I could also run it on
> OpenIndiana(open Solaris fork) and Windoze too.

GNAT itself has a test suite that runs as part of the build.  Only a few
other packages have test suites.  There is no overall test suite that
verifies the integration between packages.  Creating and maintaining one
would be a huge undertaking.

> I am pretty overloaded(ended up in emergency department twice in the
> past 3 weeks) but I would like to help. If there was any assignments
> you had for me, I would do my best to help

I suggest you concentrate on one thing and only one, then.  If you are
interested in Debian packaging, fine, let that be your one area of
expertise.  If you'd rather learn Ada and develop programs with it, I
suggest you install Debian stable (possibly in a chroot or VirtualBox)
and forget about all these pesky issues.  I've decided to concentrate on
packaging precisely so that others, especially beginners, can
concentrate on programming.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.