Re: Improving in-place upgrades of Ada packages from Lenny to Squeeze

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 
>> Over the last two weeks I have been testing upgrades of 
>> Ada packages from Lenny to Sid and Squeeze in a chroot. 
>> The picture is not as pretty as it should be.  In a 
>> nutshell, when you change /etc/apt/sources.list from lenny 
>> to squeeze (unstable, actually) and do "aptitude update", 
>> you end up with a lot of broken packages and must 
>> intervene manually to resolve the problem (i.e. remove the 
>> broken packages, install new versions).
> 
> A long-term, partial solution is to introduce a 
> "build-essential-ada" package, which depends on gnat and all 
> the current development packages.  That would also make it 
> quicker to prepare a new system for developing Ada programs. 
> (As a teacher, it is a package I have missed a lot.)

OK, since there is user demand, it seems reasonable.  Note that
the "build-essential-ada" package really is the "gnat" package;
a new package that brings in the whole shebang would rather be
called "complete-ada-development-environment-with-bells-and-
whistles" :)

>> In the case of libgnat{vsn,prj}4.3-dev, this is only 
>> because I recently added dummy transition packages, 
>> libgnat{vsn,prj}-dev in gnat-4.4 (= 4.4.4-4).
> 
> Could you create such dummy transition packages for all 
> development packages?  (Again only a long-term solution.)

No; the whole point of the package name changes is to break
the Depends: of third-party programs before they FTBFS for
reasons mysterious to the programmer but obvious to the
Debian Ada maintainers :)

> I think a short-term solution might be to make gnat suggest 
> the new versions of the development packages.  (Or the 
> above-mentioned transition packages?)

That seems quite reasonable but a Recommends: would be needed
to force automatic package upgrades (i.e. deletion of the old
packages and installation of new ones).  The other drawback is
that it would be necessary to change the "gnat" package each
time a new -dev package appears in Debian :) I think we can
live with such a drawback for the time being.

Thanks for the feedback.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.