Re: GNAT for Debian

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

Folks,

I am happy to announce that I have completed the packaging of GNAT
3.15p for Debian.  I have made one big change relative to the GNAT
3.14p package: now, the package "gnat" does not conflict with, but
instead uses, "libgnat-3.15p-1".  libgnat-3.15p-1 contains the
stripped shared libraries only.  gnat contains the static libraries
with debugging information (-g -O2) in
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/2.8.1/adalib.

The good things:

- I've just used aptitude on my local system to upgrade GNAT 3.14p
  successfully (i.e. the packages install cleanly).

- libgnat-3.14p-1 is still installed; it does not conflict with
  libgnat-3.15p-1 (the reason why it got installed is because I still
  have gnade-dev, which depends on it, installed).

- I've used it to compile all of the examples that come with GNAT's
  source distribution, and the examples run properly (the examples are
  in /usr/share/doc/gnat/examples, as you'd expect).

- All of the examples are dynamically linked against
  /usr/lib/libgnat-3.15p.so.1.1; so are the tools: gnat, gnatmake,
  gnatchop, gnatkr, etc.

- I still have gcc-3.3 installed; no conflicts.  However, for safety,
  I've made it so that gnat conflicts with gnat-3.3. (note that
  gnat-3.3 does not provide shared libraries, see bug #191997, 201882;
  so my package is actually better!).

- The compiler driver is "gnatgcc" not "gcc".  I've applied Samuel's
  patch to all of the tools so they understand this.

The bad things about the package:

- Symbolic tracebacks are not available, because this would require a
  patched version of binutils 2.9.1 (Debian bug #70501).

- gnatmem is not available for the same reason; it needs libaddr2line,
  too.

- Although I have applied Sam's patches for GNU/Linux on SPARC and
  PowerPC, I cannot try to build the package on these architectures.

- I have based the packages on sarge, not woody, because that's what I
  use; the automated build scripts have introduced a dependency on
  libc6 (>= 2.3.1-1).

I would like to know if someone has an upload area, preferably one
listed on http://www.apt-get.org, where I could upload the packages.

Alternatively, I could also send the diff.gz (12 Kb) to interested
people so they can try and build the package from sources too.  You'd
need knowledge about how to compile Debian packages.

My next step is to become an official Debian developer.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.