Fedora, Debian and other GNU/Linux distributions (was: gnatmake problem)

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

Dmitry A. Kazakov  wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:30:31 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> > Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> >> Fedora team does this [building gnat on Fedora].
> >> Alas each time the gcc goes up to the next version,
> >> something breaks in gnat. I doubt it were simple to fix by mere
> >> recompilation. (I even tempted to install Debian on a VirtualBox and try
> >> out gnat maintained by Ludovic...)
>
>> You remind me that I moved from Red Hat 8 to Debian 3.0 "Woody" back
>> in 2001 precisely because I got frustrated at bugs and their dropping
>> support for Ada between 7.3 and 8. At the time, Samuel Tardieu was the
>> maintainer and I still thank him for his excellent work.
>
> The worst thing of Fedora is these idiotic major core versions, which
> cannot be upgraded to. You can upgrade the kernel, but cannot the
> distribution. It is pathetic. I tried it each time and each time was forced
> to reinstall it completely. Are all Linux distributions like that?

Luckily, no!

Debian's philosophy is "install once, upgrade many" and indeed, I only
install once per machine. I've had my current laptop since November
2006, when I installed Debian on it, and it have upgraded it
constantly ever since. I normally upgrade every week or so, tracking
the "testing" distribution. I have also successfully upgraded servers
from one stable release to the next several times.

--
Ludovic Brenta.