Re: GNAT on Debian or Gentoo?

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

Adrian Hoe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been using SuSE Linux all the time and I am tired of SuSE's
> broken online updates which frequently crashed and hang my systems.
> This happened again 2 days ago after I performed online update to some
> systems both in my office and home. I have been testing Debian on two
> of my machines at work and both run very stable without reboot. The
> online update using apt-get was very stable indeed.
> 
> One advantage of Debian is that one can easily perform a version update
> using apt-get. A version update on SuSE is a little tricky and
> troublesome.
> 
> I am thinking of switching to Debian or Gentoo. Does anyone have any
> experience developing Ada applications on both Debian and Gentoo Linux?
> 
> I read some unfavored comments on Gentoo regarding outdated emerge on
> gnat and Ada related packages. On the other hand, I have heard many
> good comments about developing Ada applications on both Debian and
> Gentoo. I have also read and heard about developing Ada applications on
> SuSE.
> 
> I am a little confused and eagerly to move away from SuSE or I should
> stay with SuSE.
> 
> Can someone shine some light of wisdom on me?
> 
> Thanks and best regards,
> --
> Adrian Hoe
> http://adrianhoe.net
> 


Since a lot of the commercial companies (at least in the US) that claim 
to support Linux target Red hat as the primary (or only) Linux, we tend 
to use it at work when we use Linux.

So, for home use, I decided to go with Centos (www.centos.org) which 
attempts to be very close to red hat releases with the changes being 
generally limited to staying in compliance with the Red hat Trademark 
guidelines.

I have successfully upgraded OS versions with yum under Centos.

Note that even for normal updates, I have been mildly burned by yum 
updates. The biggest problem has been things like php library changes 
that I update and then don't reboot. When I finally reboot for other 
reasons 3 months later and my website stops working, it has taken as 
long 10-15 minutes to figure out what I broke.

Centos is not the "best" Linux around and I would not claim anything 
like the level of support for Ada that Debian currently has but it 
probably deserves a spot in the trade space.