Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[Tapio Kelloniemi <invalid@localdomain.com>]

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>OK, here are the votes so far.  There are four contenders for the
>title of "next Ada compiler for Debian": GNAT GPL 2005 Edition
>(gnat-gpl below), gnat-3.4, gnat-4.0 and gnat-3.4+patches backported
>from gnat-gpl.

In my opinion, GNAT GPL has only one problem: it is based on GCC 3.4
which is not what my host system compiler is (4.0.1) and I don't want
to have two GCC's installed, nor do I want to compile some packages
with one and others with another. If I used Debian, I would use the
most recent GCC version (the same which is used for compiling programs
in other languages as well) and hope that it has Ada2005 support.

So:
  2 pts: GCC-4.0 (or preferably 4.1)
  1 pts: GNAT GPL (but ONLY if it HAS support for C, C++, Objective-C and
         Java). If it does not support these languages: 0 pts for all
         the rest, since GCC 4.0 has better Ada2005 support (and is
         otherwise more featureful) than the older versions (obsolescent
         form my point of view).

Actually patching the most recent GCC to get the most recent Ada2005
support would be my choice, but it won't most likely be available for
a while.

>PS. If you voice your opinion, I'd like to hear about your current
>distribution and version of GNAT.  I'd also like to hear your reasons
>for using, or not using, Debian.  Just curious.

I don't use Debian, andmost likely will never use, since I compile all
my installed software from source code (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/).
If I used a distribution, I would probably use Debian, since it strictly
separates free and non-free software packages from each other and because
it calls itself a GNU/Linux distro.

-- 
Tapio