Re: Latest GNAT version

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> No. AdaCore have not made a formal "p" release sice 3.15p, but they
> seem to think that GCC 3.4 and 4.0 are good enough. Which is true,
> except that these versions don't support ASIS or the distributed
> systems annex GLADE.
> 
> If enough people politely ask for a newer "p" release with ASIS and
> GLADE, perhaps they will listen?  I for one would very much like to
> transition Ada in Debian to GCC 4.0, which will be the system compiler
> for the next stable release, codenamed "etch".

If ASIS and GLADE could be lifted out from this hypothetical new "p" 
release and used with GCC 4.x releases without a lot of patching � good. 
Otherwise I think it would be better � at least for us free software 
users � if ASIS and GLADE could be kept in sync with GCC, because it 
would be easier to get them into OS distributions that way.

Redhat provides the Ada part of GCC in Fedora Core, but hardly any other 
Ada packages. The situation seems to be similar with Suse. I've been 
thinking that maybe I should learn RPM and make some Ada packages for 
Fedora Extras. ASIS would be a candidate but it would have to work with 
the GCC release selected for each release of Fedora Core.

It's a great advantage to C, Perl, Python and other languages that they 
are so readily available in the free Unixoids. A complete development 
environment with lots of libraries can be installed with a single 
command, or is even installed by default. I want Ada to have the same 
advantage, and not just in Debian but in other distributions too. ASIS 
is a vital part. Even Gnat appears incomplete when the tools that depend 
on ASIS are missing. It would therefore be very good if there were an 
ASIS release that worked with recent GCC releases. (I suppose GLADE 
would also be good to have, although I personally don't have a use for it.)

-- 
Bj�rn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
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