gnat-3.2 transition plan

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org>]

I confess to having made an omission when drawing up the gcc-3.2
transition plan.  I concentrated on C++ and completely ignored other
languages.  I do not know what (if anything) nees to be done for Java
or Fortran.  However, I've done a small amount of investigation on
what needs to be done for Ada.  Comments and corrections welcomed.

First, what packages are affected?  On my i386-unstable box, only the
following packages depend on either gnat or libgnat-3.14p-1

  adacgi
  asis-programs
  gch
  gnade-dev
  gnat-glade
  libadasockets0-dev
  libasis-3.14p-1
  libgtkada1-dev
  topal

(why don't libadaodbc1 or libadasockets0 show up on this?  are there
other Ada packages we're missing from this list?)

Source packages:

  adacgi
  adasockets
  asis
  gch
  gnade
  gnat-glade
  libgtkada
  topal

So we're not dealing with nearly as large a problem as C++.


First problem: arch list.  gnat-3.2 is available on everything except
arm & m68k.  Rumour has it gnat-3.3 will be available on m68k too.
So I propose arch: any for these packages and they will simply fail on
arm & m68k for the moment.  This seems more sensible than asking package
maintainers to track which architectures have managed to get gnat working.


Second problem: dependencies in the debian/control file.  They probably
look something like this:

  Build-Depends: gnat (>= 3.14p-1), gnat (<< 3.15)
and
  Depends: gnat (>= 3.14p-1), gnat (<< 3.15)

What should these look like?  I'm tempted to say:

  Build-Depends: gnat
and
  Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}

For this to work, I think we need a libgnat3.15a.shlibs file.  Also, gnat
is a virtual package provided by gnat-3.2, which the autobuilders aren't
going to like.


Anything further needs to be done?

-- 
"It's not Hollywood.  War is real, war is primarily not about defeat or
victory, it is about death.  I've seen thousands and thousands of dead bodies.
Do you think I want to have an academic debate on this subject?" -- Robert Fisk