Re: Ada packages for NetBSD

[Berndt Josef Wulf <wulf%ping.net.au@localhost>]

G'day,

ADA has a large following in industries dealing with defense, avionics, 
science, medical  equipment and other mission critical applications. 

I ported gnat-3.12p to NetBSD-386 way back in the late 90's. When ADA became 
part of the GCC source tree my suggestion of having ADA integrated into the 
NetBSD distribution failed to find any resonance.

Developers working with ADA seek out platforms that support it and 
unfortunately NetBSD never did. Hence it never had a chance of making many 
friends in this community. 

cheerio Berndt


On 06/02/10 Sad Clouds wrote:
How many people are using Ada programming language on NetBSD?

I noticed the lack of binary Ada packages, and even if some are
available, they are too old to bootstrap a newer gcc4 Ada compiler.

I guess the difficulty comes from the fact that you need a working Ada
compiler in order to build a new one.

I did a canadian cross build of gcc-4.4.3 in order to get the following
native Ada compilers for NetBSD-5.0:

gcc4-ada_i386, gcc4-ada_amd64 and gcc4-ada_sparc64

Maybe other platforms can be supported as well. I don't know if cross
built amd64 and sparc64 compilers work, since I don't have the machines
to test them.

Since doing canadian corss builds takes a lot of time, it would be
nice to have a few binary Ada packages in pkgsrc. Also we could provide
instructions on how to set up a tool chain, in case someone wants to
try building a native Ada compiler for other platforms.

Would any developers who have access to pkgsrc, be interested in
building/testing Ada compilers and uploading them to ftp server?