Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 22:06:36 -0600 From: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com> To: freebsd-ports@coreland.ath.cx Cc: ports@freebsd.org, ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org, eischen@vigrid.com Subject: Re: Improving Ada support on FreeBSD and in the ports system Message-ID: <20091108040636.GC18823@lonesome.com> In-Reply-To: <20091107212936.GB85348@logik.internal.network> References: <20091107212936.GB85348@logik.internal.network>
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It's true that the Ada packages have suffered a fair amount of bit-rot in the past year or so. I'm happy to see someone stepping forward to work on them. On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 09:29:36PM +0000, freebsd-ports@coreland.ath.cx wrote: > PROBLEM 1. Lack of packages > > Of the 10 packages listed, only three of those (maybe two) actually > work. There were several more working, but a recent compiler update broke them. At that time the portmgr team went ahead and marked the ports "broken". That both advises users that they don't compile, and also triggers a periodic email to the ports@ mailing list. Beyond that we have to rely on work done by individual contributors. > PROBLEM 3. Compiler version chaos and lack of architecture support > > I believe there needs to be a mechanism to select an Ada compiler > for use with packages. I'm not sure what the Ports system currently > provides for this case. [...] The setting should probably be a > port option that can be set in make.conf. Most of the general mechanisms for selecting "port alternative foo vs. bar" live in ports/Mk. In particular, you will probably want to look at ports/Mk/bsd.gcc.mk. A more advanced example is in bsd.java.mk. Note: don't feel bad if you don't understand the contents of these files; they have evolved to their current state over quite some period of time. It's perfectly fair to ask for help. > Lack of architecture support is a time-consuming issue. Both GCC > and GNAT have support for a wide range of architectures but GNAT > only has support for FreeBSD i386 (and now AMD64 in trunk). I have > produced bootstrap binaries for GCC 4.4 on i386 and AMD64 on FreeBSD > 7.2 (and will produce binaries for 8.0 when it arrives) but do > not have access to any other architectures running FreeBSD. For something like this that isn't widely used, I wouldn't spend too much time on anything other than i386 and amd64. That's where the majority of our user base is (I'm guessing 80% and 15%, respectively, based on the PR arrival statistics.) I run the sparc64 package builds, and those machines have plenty of trouble keeping up with the things they're already asked to build :-) mcl
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