RFC: Debian Policy for Ada, Fourth Edition for Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"

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

Over the past month, Stephe Leake and I have put in a lot of effort
towards updating the Debian Policy for Ada[1].  We think we have
reached
a state where the new policy is almost ready and so I have published a
draft[2] of the next edition.  I would like to call upon every
interested party to read the new draft and send us their comments.

[1] http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.pdf
[2] http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy4draft1.pdf

The Debian Policy for Ada is what sets Debian's support for Ada apart
from the rest.  It has served us well over the past three releases of
Debian: 3.1 "Sarge", released in June 2005; 4.0 "Etch" in April 2007;
and 5.0 "Lenny" in February 2009.

The biggest change to the Policy is that it now requires that every -
dev
package for an Ada library include the version number of the library
in
its name.  For example, "libaws-dev" should become "libaws2.5-dev" to
comply with this policy.  The draft document explains the reasons
behind
this decision in great detail.  However, if you can propose a scheme
that avoids the need for this change, please speak up.

In related news, the Debian release managers have just proposed[3] a
freeze in March 2010; this means that the maintainers of Ada packages
now have 5 months to migrate all the packages to gnat-4.4.  This
migration will start in earnest.  As usual, I reiterate my call for
contributions: if you use one of the Ada packages in Debian, please
consider helping the maintainer with the transition.

[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/10/msg00002.html

Happy hacking!

--
Ludovic Brenta.