Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm going to recompile the existing Ada packages in Debian using GNAT > 3.15p, at least on x86. > > This involves the following steps: > > - Packaging GNAT 3.15p (mostly done). I'm going to omit DSO support > (see below). > > - Fixing the FTBFS errors of current Ada packages (not necessarily > 3.15p-specific). Drop DSO support, too. > > - Let someone upload the packages (I'm not a DD). > > - After some time, request removal of the existing and now unneeded > DSO packages. > > Why no DSO support? The GNAT ABI changes in *each* release, and the > run-time library can only be built with the corresponding GNAT > version. This means that if we want true backwards compatibility > (including a buildable libgnat-3.14p), we'd have to keep around GNAT > 3.14p (and GNAT 3.15p and so on), and all libraries depending on it. > This doesn't look acceptable to me. > > GNAT supports source-based (Ada) package repositories, but I think > it's still worthwhile to add precompiled object code libraries, to cut > down compilation time. The source repository approach is interesting > once we want to support multiple GNAT installations in parallel (à la > common-lisp-controller), though.
Florian, I don't agree. I understand your arguments but honestly, there is no more than one ACT release per year. So people don't have to often rebuilt their programs and libraries. Of course, there aren't a lot of Ada applications in Debian but DSO is a real benefit in terms of binary size. It would be a regression to stop DSO support. > What about other architectures besides x86? Honestly, I don't know. > The only non-x86 Debian port I looked at was the SPARC one, and it > is incomplete (it includes some Solaris-specific code and fails to > build GNAT 3.x as a result). If there is demand for Ada on this > architecture and someone shows me a proof that GNAT 3.14p is in > reasonably good shape (e.g. good ACATS results), I'll try to make > 3.15p competitive in this regard. I think you should post this message to debian-devel in order to get a larger audience, because so far, GNAT was not related to GCC releases. Cheers, -- Jérôme Marant http://marant.org
