Re: Bug#746588: gnat should be an architecture dependent package
Thorsten Glaser writes:
> Right, but there is still the transition period to take care of.
There are two transition periods. The first one started on 2014-02-03
with the announcement of gnat-4.9 and ended on 2014-05-01 with the
upload of gnat (=4.9). This three-month period was to bootstrap and
stabilize gnat-4.9. The second transition period started with the
upload of gnat (=4.9) and is for the upgrade and recompilation of all
Ada packages. This second period ends with the freeze (2014-11-05) and
we really need all the time we can get. In fact, right now I should be
spending my time on libgtkada or some other package.
If I had been aware of your porting efforts, I might have delayed the
upload of gnat (=4.9) by a few days but not weeks.
>> gnat to depend on different versions of gnat-x.y on different
>> architectures would defeat this purpose. If some architecture cannot
>
> This is not the intention. The idea here is that, for as long
> as the _new_ version of gnat cannot _yet_ be built, the old
> version can stick around for some architecture. We will *see*
> the new version, and know there is something to do, but until
> such time, we can still use the old version.
The problem is simply that m68k failed to produce a working gnat-4.9 in
time for the upload of gnat. As I said, if I had been aware of your
efforts I could have helped a little.
>> support the chosen version of gnat-x.y, then we prefer to drop
>> support for that achitecture altogether.
>
> Really? Especially debian-ports.org architectures can sometimes
> be a bit slower in adopting things like this, but gnat *can*
> work there. Do you really want to throw this into porters' faces?
Yes, really. I'm not saying this to disparage your work or your
dedication but, honestly, how many people do you think write and deploy
Ada programs, on Debian, on m68k machines? Ada is a minority language,
for starters. popcon shows ~1000 installs of gnat-4.6 on all
architectures of Debian (compare this with ~170k installs of libc6). In
my 10+ years of maintaining Ada on Debian, I have learned to allocate my
time in the way that I perceive will benefit the most users. Sorry.
What I can do for you at this point is accept your m68k patches and
apply them in future uploads of gnat-4.9.
>> objections, please explain the benefits of making it easier to break
>> policy.
>
> There is no break of any policy involved. If something depends on gnat
> 4.9, it must have 'gnat (>= 4.9)' in Build-Depends anyway, for at
> least until gnat 4.9 (distinguished from gnat-4.9) is in stable or
> even oldstable, which is true for all versioned Build-Depends in
> Debian.
No, the Debian Ada Policy says that packages must build-depend on both
gnat and gnat-4.9 (and explains why).
--
Ludovic Brenta.
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