Re: GNAT in Debian, heads up

[Stanislav Tsekhmistroh <stas@kometalab.com.ua>]

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 20:54:58 +0200, Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> It depends on your goals.  If you just want to write Ada software, I
> recommend using Debian Sarge and gnat 3.15p-12.  You will have the
> full complement of tools and libraries available to you, and no
> "moving target" problem for another 14 months at least.  If you want
> to work on the Debian packages for the next release of Debian, you are
> most welcome; see below.

Since I am relatively new to Ada, my intention is to keep investigating
GNAT and using it in my new projects. (Because I have seen all important
advantages of Ada in my field: my activity is industrial automation.)
While I keep moving on, I'll dig the GNAT sources and try to be usefull.

The situation is like that:
I understand that I need GNAT, but since the ACT rule the GNAT
(at least by this moment :-)), and they don't even stoop to answer my
email messages, I don't see other way than to take what we have and make
all my best. Btw, my company is precisely in the category that "is out of
the ACT scope".

> 
>>> And what help is needed most of all?
> 
> Since I'm planning to start transitioning to GCC 4.1 in a month or so,
> now would be a good time to learn the internals of how the gcc-4.0 and
> gcc-snapshot packages are built.  The build scripts are fairly
> complex, because they have to take care of 8 languages, 12 platforms,
> and hundreds of patches.  Later, I will need help with:
> 
> * porting relevant patches to gnat-4.1 (from gnat): symbolic tracebacks,
>   bug fixes, libgnatprj, etc;
> 
> * supporting biarch where it makes sense (especially powerpc64 and
>   amd64)
> 
> * building gnat-gps 3.0
> 
> * porting asis and glade to gnat-4.1
> 
> * rebuilding all other packages with the new compiler
> 
> in that order.  This will take several months to achieve.