Re: GNAT for Debian

[George Shapovalov <georges@its.caltech.edu>]

Chris M. Moore wrote:
> It seems cleaner, less work and more maintainable to build gnat as

Well, this seems all nice and sound, but there are such things as FHS and
LSB, and in this case GNAE, which pretty much define what goes where. Of
course when you build it on your own you are free to screw your system as
you wish ;) (even then FHS says you should put it under /usr/local).
However if we are talking about a package for a respectable distribution
(such as Gentoo or Debian ;)) placing this stuff under /opt is
inappropriate (this one is reserved for biary packages). Sometimes there is
really no easy way around and one is forced to bundle a package in a way it
is built, however even then it should go under /usr/lib/$PkgName and proper
symlinks should be created (and possibly docs moved to proper place.., well
may be there will be something else as well :)).
Randhol is definitely free to do as he wishes, however I would expect Debian
devs to take the position similar to what he demonstrated just now. And
finally, wouldn't you like to use a properly built and installed package
;)?


> I did look at this not long ago but I abandoned my attempt to port
> 3.14 PATCHes to 3.15 for this very reason.  It just seemed harder than
> it should be.

Feel free to look at the ebuilds we have for Gentoo here:
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-lang/gnat/
for the gnat package (an update to the already posted ebuild is coming soon)
and here:
http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-ada/
for some apps that already made it in..

George