Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

Roberty Dewar wrote:
> Yes, and that's actually an interesting example. The original DOS port
> was done by a volunteer (Doug Rupp, who now works full time for ACT).
> It was quite a tricky port, but once done, the work to update it to
> new versions of the GNAT sources is quite straightforward. However,
> disappointingly the DOS version has not really kept up with current
> development, let alone contributed development input of its own.

AFAIK, 3.13p packaged for DOS went out before the Linux version
(gnuada project on sourceforge) and is actively maintained.

On the topic of "volunteer ... who now works full time for ACT" I
think it is fair that ACT has put on its payroll a lot of the people
interested in contributing to GNAT as part of the company growth, and
that is a very good thing for the GNU project IMHO, I wouldn't dare to
say that it has sucked all the available GNU Ada workforce ;-) ;-).

> I think a more promising source of energy is the GNAT/GNU/Linux cooperation
> which has for example generated RPM's for each new release of GNAT, and 
> usually quite quickly, although the latest 3.13p release has not yet got
> RPM's available.

The Linux x86 RPMs (RH 6.x, 7.0, Mandrake 7.1, SuSE 7.0) for 3.13p are
available but have been announced only to some mailing lists to iron
out the install process on various distributions by active beta
testers, the full announcement will come soon. Note that the ALT team
provides synchronized RPMs of GNAT, ASIS, GLADE, JGNAT, Florist and
more than a dozen of other useful Ada packages, URL
<http://www.gnuada.org/alt.html>.

The debian GNU/Linux packages for 3.13p are also available from
<http://www.debian.org>.

Hopefully the ALT team will be able to leave the packaging burden to
distributors once GNAT is a first-class citizen in the GCC project.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>