Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

<<So if there is a need for an outside project to work on GNAT to get it
to work well in GNU/Linux, does that mean the standard GNAT is not
paying enough attention to the system it is part of?
>>

The issue is generating RPM's, which we (ACT) do not provide. Note that
historically most distribution of software in the GNU system has
concentrated on distributing compilable sources, rather than turnkey
binaries. 

ACT does provide binaries in our standard release form, and they work
just fine on GNU/Linux. But some people prefer to use binaries in
RPM form, so we make sure these are available to by working closely
with the GNAT for GNU/Linux team, who are a set of volunteers who
help to make GNAT more useful, especially for casual users under Linux.

Part of the reason that we have not made RPM's available is that it is
not actually easy to do this without introducing some subtle tasking
errors. For casual use, no one cares too much about these errors, but
we have not made RPM's available to our customers pending resolution of
the technical issues here, which are tricky.

But as I say, our binary release for GNU/Linux work just fine, and we
have lots of people, both supported paying customers, and users of the
public binary version, including students, free software developers etc,
who are using our binary release without any problems.

Robert Dewar