Re: Versions of the Ada Reference Manual in Debian
On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 04:06:41PM +0200, Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> Alas, not everyone can choose to work with the latest Ada standard.
> Hence GNAT still supports Ada83, Ada95 and Ada05. Personally I would
> love to have all 4 manuals available. As the manuals never change and
> new ones come around only every 5 to 10 years, how much extra work could
> that be ?
>
> gr.
> Jerry.
Adaic provides HTML browsable versions of older standards at [1],
giving the impression that the manuals are available as free software.
However, packaging is not trivial, as you can see at [2].
- AdaIC only provides the prefered form of modification ("unformatted
sources") for the *latest* version of the manual.
- These sources are available via a ZIP archive whose name contains no
version. In other words, its content may change with the same name,
breaking assumptions of downstream packagers.
- Their history (> 2005) is also visible via a CVS web interface. The
current ZIP archive does not even match the Ada2012_Final tag of the
CVSWeb interface (even if ignoring new lines and casing problems).
- Formatting them requires either non-free tools, either a formatter
whose source are only available via the CVSWeb interface (no ZIP).
This interface handles casing and new lines poorly. Even finding the
right version of each source file is tricky.
- Further processing tools like texinfo may be updated and transform
some warnings into errors. Patching is then not trivial, because
changes have indirect effects: formatter must be compiled, executed,
and its output processed by texinfo.
[1] http://www.adaic.org/ada-resources/standards/.
[2] http://sources.debian.net/src/ada-reference-manual/1:2012.1-2/debian
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