Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[Tapio Kelloniemi <invalid@localdomain.com>]

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>That said, I have a history of backporting fixes from the head of GCC
>into "The Debian Ada compiler".  I have backported about 20 such fixes
>into gnat 3.15p, and I intend to continue doing that for the next
>"Debian Ada compiler", whichever that is.  Of course, I do this only
>on my spare time, and because I volunteer to do so.  And, of course,
>I am only willing to support *one* branch this way; I have not
>backported any fixes into either gnat-3.4 or gnat-4.0 yet for this
>reason.

I would suggest making GNAT GPL one of those "unsupported" branches
(since almost nobody seems to like it). Then dropping gnat-3.4 could
be done and GNAT-4.0 could get fixes/features backported from 4.1, if
someone does that. I don't much like the idea of multiple branches
(in Debian), since all Ada libraries are compiled using what is choosen to
be the main Ada compiler. This leaves those who don't want to use the main
compiler without precompiled binaries.

>So, if GCC 4.0 should be chosen as the next Ada compiler for Debian,
>chances are that I'll be able to backport Ada fixes from 4.1 into it.
>I make no promises, but at least I'll try if my time allows.

In that case I would suggest doing those backports to upstream as well,
since the effort is the same anyway.

>I am not a fan of "the latest version at all costs".  I prefer to
>choose a stable branch such as 3.4 or 4.0, and selectively backport
>fixes in order to improve *stability* and *correctness*.

I suggest this as well and as Debian has already choosen 4.0 as the host
compiler, I encourage choosing 4.0 for Ada as well.

-- 
Tapio