Re: Self-introduction

Vratislav Podzimek <vpodzime@redhat.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> my name is Vratislav Podzimek. I'm a member of the Installer team at
> Red Hat primarily focusing on storage configuration and management.
> Other than that I'm also a "junior Ada enthusiast".

Welcome to the team, Vratislav! Have you found the Ada packaging policy?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Ada

> Last weekend I
> spent some time trying to build GPS on my Fedora 23, but after
> overcoming 10 issues I gave up.

Yeah, that's probably not the best place to begin. Packaging Adacore's
software is far from trivial, unfortunately. Their idea of how to
distribute software isn't well aligned with Fedora's. I think you should
get some experience before you take on GPS.

There was an attempt to package it once:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=834747

> So here I come with a hope to get some advice as well as some tasks
> to help with to make it easier for people to develop in Ada on Fedora.

I don't suppose you happen to have some hardware of one of the secondary
architectures? In that case you might be able to help with the effort
to get an up-to-date GPRbuild going on the secondary architectures.

If multilib compatibility is important to you, then there's an issue
that you could choose to work on. 32- and 64-bit -devel packages are
supposed to be parallel-installable, but those packages that have begun
using gprinstall aren't, because gprinstall generates GNAT project
files without multilib support. The project files would need to be
fixed up at the end of the %install section.

I have also been wanting to look into Devassistant and the Developer
Portal to see if it would make sense to add something Ada-related there.
You could look at that if you're interested.

If you want to make new packages, then you could for example pick
something from https://codelabs.ch/. I've packaged Anet. I had to patch
their makefile to make compiler and linker options, directories and
file permissions configurable, but I had much less trouble with that
than with Adacore's stuff. I managed to convince them to accept my
patches.

> My first question is -  are there any plans to build the 2015 toolset
> for Fedora? I noticed all the built packages are based on the 2014
> version now.

Do you mean in Fedora 22? In Fedora 23 on the primary architectures we
have the 2015 versions of XMLada, GPRbuild, AWS and Aunit, and GTKada
3.8.3 which is also distributed as "2015". We don't normally push
version upgrades to stable releases, as that would introduce soname
changes and possibly other incompatibilities.

On the secondary architectures some packages are blocked by the
GPRbuild trouble.

Björn Persson