Re: patch for -Wno-long-long and early GNAT compilers

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

Joe Buck wrote:

> [...] But what about older GNAT versions?  For example, Debian "potato" has
> version 3.12p; Debian "woody" has 3.13p.  I'm sure that one or both of
> these versions have been packaged for many other OSes as well.
> 
> It would be easier for third parties to build from source if one or both
> of those versions could be made to work.  Is this out of the question as
> too difficult, or is it a more minor matter?  I'm not saying that this
> should be a requirement, but I'd like some clue as to the cost.  Maybe
> it's good enough that just 3.14 can do the job.

Debian stable as 3.12p, testing has 3.13p and unstable has 3.14p according
to 
<http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?searchon=names&keywords=gnat>

The only thing we have to do IMHO is to carefully document
what version is expected to work for the adventurous people
willing to build GNAT with GCC 3.1.0, since we have no comitment to enable
the Ada build without the user explicitely specifying ada as
language.

The debian GNAT package is actively maintained, I don't expect
any problem with it. For other distributions, there is the ACT
tarball at:

<ftp://ftp.cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/3.14p/gnat-3.14p-i686-pc-linux-gnu-bin.tar.gz>

I believe it makes no sense to be backward compatible to all
version of GNAT, we're just trying to get a wider audience
and this probably means helping out distribution makers willing
to add Ada to their tool box to set up their build system
with a known to work binary of GNAT to build their
next distribution.

If most of the testing is based on 3.14 (at least that's what ACT uses), 
then we should
just document that binary of 3.14 from X and Y sources on various 
platforms are
known to work as starting point to build the 3.1.0 from the source 
distribution with
Ada enabled.

BTW, I hope the interested distribution makers will contact the GCC project
on this issue.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>