[Pkg-electronics-devel] GHDL and Debian

[Brian Drummond]

On Sun, 2013-05-26 at 11:39 -0600, Wesley J. Landaker wrote:
> On Sunday, May 26, 2013 04:07:47 Brian Drummond wrote:
> > On Sat, 2013-05-25 at 18:16 -0700, Jon Taylor wrote:
> > > 
> > > I just installed Ubuntu latest on my new laptop, and when attempting
> > > to get GHDL installed I found out about this:

> > TL/DR : if you're not up to building gcc from source, sorry there will
> > be a wait.
> > 
> > I knew Wesley was looking into this but I didn't know he gave up from
> > time pressures; he only reported this to Debian, not here.
> 
> Well, I'm not *completely* dead yet. =) 
Glad to hear it!
> https://mail.gna.org/public/ghdl-discuss/2012-01/msg00007.html
and I hope we have moved on from that point.

> But yes, sadly, I'm very strapped for time in relation to what the GHDL 
> package in Debian requires. 

I don't think it's worth much effort as an official package until
Ludovic has managed to get Gnat back in sync with GCC, then (as I'm
using Debian) it would make sense for me (or someone) to try and track
the Debian gcc versions with the upstream source.

>  starting 
> from Joris' external package (which needs some changes to follow Debian's 
> package requirements), 

This would be my suggestion if Joris can keep track of upstream work. It
might be helpful to outline the changes required.

> and/or by integrating Debianization more closely into 
> upstream development (which BTW, could grealy benefit from moving to Git). 

Upstream ghdl is another discussion. Tristan is basically the sole
authority over the current repository, and has very little time. 

However he did pop up to clean up my rudimentary 4.7.2 work into SVN
revision 150 which is the current starting point (though a couple of
patches are still required on top of R150)

David Koontz also has ideas on moving forward. 

My view is that the trunk should remain fully under Tristan's control,
but another branch (perhaps still on gna.org) would be a suitable place
for contributions from myself and others. As it is, there are patches
attached to bug reports and support tickets, and no one fully current
codebase. 

This "unstable" branch could not be guaranteed to Tristan's rigorous
standards for LRM compliance but - hopefully - he can draw on it
periodically to update the trunk if time permits.

> Of course, I'd love to also see us in the Debian+GHDL niche collaborating 
> more efficiently and directly with the current upstream (which currently 
> appears to me to de facto be Brian Drummond, although the original author, 
> Tristan Gingold may still be working on it as well) 

I've not heard from Tristan in a while.

> getting more of the hacks that 
> distros are having to do into GHDL upstream, 

What are these hacks?  

If they are only relevant to a specific distro, they can probably best
remain there. But if they fix upstream issues, I would recommend that -
for the moment at least - they are reported on either 
https://gna.org/bugs/?group=ghdl
or
https://gna.org/support/?group=ghdl
with description, testcase and patch
so that there is upstream visibility of them. 

Thanks for this update - I think it's a useful contribution to keeping
GHDL going.

- Brian