Status of Ada in Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"

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

Pursuant to [1] here is a summary of the state of Ada packages
in Debian.

The short summary is: All is well, we are ready for the freeze
except for one package.

The long summary follows.

We first published the revised Debian Policy for Ada[2] back in
October.  There is now a link to this document from
http://www.debian.org/devel.

We then planned our work targetting a freeze in March 2010. We
are in very, very good shape now.

We have completed the transition of all packages (except one)
from gnat-4.3 to gnat-4.4 and recently removed gnat-4.3 from
unstable (#573022).  apq-postgresql has not completed the
transition yet; it is in unstable and is blocked from
migrating by #570887 (FTBFS on some architectures).  This
blocks apq from migrating to testing and also blocks the
removal of gnat-4.3 from testing.

Several people have joined in the effort to maintain more Ada
packages in Debian; one of them is now an official Debian
Maintainer[3] and a couple others are in the pipeline.

To coordinate the effort, a new mailing list has been created:
debian-ada@lists.debian.org.

The new maintainers adopted some of my existing packages and added
several new ones.  All the packages are now in testing with no RC
bugs.  We have been in quasi-freeze for a couple of months now 
(no aliversion changes) and have been busy fixing bugs without
disrupting anything.  A handful of packages are in unstable and
will transition to testing this week, fixing a few more (non-RC)
bugs, but the versions of these packages in testing have all
already completed the transition to gnat-4.4.

We have been forced to drop support for alpha from all packages
because of a compiler bug[4].  We have also dropped support for mips
from a subset of our packages because of #566234.  Finally, we have
dropped support for mipsel from one large package, gnat-gps, due
to the unavailability of buildd machines.  OTOH, we have introduced
support for armel in some packages, although here again the main
problem is availability of buildd machines; not all packages that
support armel are built there.  This has not prevented their
migration to testing, so I consider this a minor problem.

Given our good shape I do hope that the freeze takes place at the
end of March 2010 and the final release very soon thereafter.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/03/msg00005.html
[2] http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ada/2010/03/msg00000.html
[4] http://gcc.gnu.org/PR42073

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.