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Bug#802838: ada: gnatgcc-5 and gnatmake symlinks



On 26.10.2015 22:31, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> writes:
I've never understood why this link moved to the versioned gnat
package and didn't stay in the unversioned gnat package. So maybe we
changed that when preparing the ada cross compiler?

The cross compiler builds shouldn't ship such unversioned links at
all. I very much would prefer to have these links in the unversioned
gnat package again.

My first reaction is to agree wholeheartedly but one of Nicolas'
greatest qualities is that he discusses and documents such changes
beforehand:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-ada/2014/04/msg00000.html

I think the problem he wanted to solve was to be able to build gnat-x.y
with itself even during the transition period when gnat pointed to an
earlier, or later, on nonexistent, gnat-x'.y'.

Now I'm not sure how such a situation could arise, or how it could
prevent building gnat-x.y.

I remember having difficulties with the build dependencies, selecting the appropriate compiler. Some buildds respect alternative build dependencies, some are not. Sure you can build a gnat-5 using a gnat-4.9, but you can't cross-build a gnat-5 using gnat-4.9. That's why I choose more explicit build dependencies. I think, if you are a developer, and you know about your b-d's you always can ignore or override these.

Not sure about gnatmake and others. I'm not an gnat developer.  If it
is possible that the versioned tools can be used on its own, then
again I would prefer to ship these in the gnat package.

No, the "versioned" tools cannot be used on their own.  We don't want to
require users to type gnatmake-x.y instead of gnatmake; and there is a
whole bunch of user-facing programs that call each other, too, like
gnatls, gprbuild, etc.

Agreed on the users (Ada developers) point of view. I assume this has to be a trade-off between co-installability of gnat-XY packages and user experience. My question then is, if I can rely on the versioned tools to build a cross compiler, or to cross build the gnat-XY packages. I'd like to do that.

Matthias


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