Improving Ada support on FreeBSD and in the ports system

[Daniel Eischen]

On Sat, 7 Nov 2009, freebsd-ports at coreland.ath.cx wrote:

> [Apologies for the possible double-post, I mistyped the From: address]
>
> Hello.
>
> It's come to my attention that the FreeBSD ports system has very poor support
> for Ada and Ada software in general.
>
> A quick search on Freshports for 'Ada' shows the following packages:
>
> devel/adabooch            - No dependencies registered!
> devel/adacurses           - lang/gnat
> devel/adasdl              - lang/gnat
> net/adasockets            - lang/gnat       (broken)
> textproc/xmlada           - lang/gnat-gcc41 (broken)
> textproc/xmlada-gps       - lang/gnat       (broken)
> x11-toolkits/gtkada       - lang/gnat       (broken)
> x11-toolkits/gtkada-devel - lang/gnat       (broken)
> x11-toolkits/gtkada-gcc   - lang/gnat-gcc41 (broken)
> x11-toolkits/gtkada-gps   - lang/gnat       (broken)
>
> I'm aware there are more packages than this in the ports sytem. The situation
> doesn't get any better the more you read...
>
> The problems any user of Ada on FreeBSD faces are:
>
>  PROBLEM 1. Lack of packages (as shown above)
>
>    Of the 10 packages listed, only three of those (maybe two) actually
>    work.

The packages are way out of date and don't build with the newer
GNAT's.  Patches welcome.

>  PROBLEM 2. No choice in the use of compiler
>
>    The Ada world is essentially divided between the GCC version of GNAT
>    that can produce executables not tainted by the GPL (GNAT-FSF) and the
>    GPL version (GNAT-GPL) from AdaCore which can't.
>
>    Debian, for example, only uses GNAT-FSF (but one can, of course,
>    just download GNAT-GPL from AdaCore and use it without issue).
>
>  PROBLEM 3. Compiler version chaos and lack of architecture support
>
>    We have:
>
>      lang/gnat       (GPL 2009 version, i386 only)

Patches for amd64 support are also welcome.  I thought you were
going to do a port for GNAT-gpl amd64?

-- 
DE