Re: GNAT for Debian

[Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org>]

Chris M. Moore wrote:
> It seems cleaner, less work and more maintainable to build gnat as
> intended and then to front-end the compiler than to PATCH the
> source/Makefiles to generate gnatgcc executables.  But if you want to
> do it the hard way then I won't refuse to use your package.  ;-)

No it is quite the opposite. It is harder to maintain this way. The
reason is that no Linux distribution is using the gcc 2.8.1 anymore so
every Linux distribution will have a gcc 2.95 or higher. It will always
be a mess if there are two gcc versions as most likely the wrong is
called. Besides the scripts need to be hacked so they work propperly for
the distributions. Finally installing outside /usr would never be accepted
behaviour of a package. It is not clean at all.

> 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.

To changes calles to gcc to gnatgcc is not hard at all.

That all the names where changed to have a gnat prefix was a very good
idea. I have never had problems running the gnatmake on debian. And it
is the end user which is important. Not that the maintainer have to run
a sed script over the source. The only time I had problems were when I
tried the binaries from ACT which does not name gcc as gnatgcc and puts
the installation in a separate directory.

-- 
Ada95 is good for you.
http://www.crystalcode.com/codemage/MainMenu/Coding/Ada/IntroducingAda.php