Re: Adding GNAT/GCC-Ada to Guix

[Fernando Oleo Blanco <irvise_ml@irvise.xyz>]

Thank you Denis and Ricardo for your input.

Denis, regarding the existence of low-level Ada libraries for hardware 
development, we do have quite a few! And I would be interested in 
packaging a couple of them. One would be the very well-known BareBones 
Runtimes [1] and also SweetAda [2]. Having SPARK also built fully from 
scratch and fully reproducibly would be extremely nice too.

I have talked with some people over at IRC and they recommended the use 
of the smaller GCC-Ada/GNAT binaries from Debian (even from older 
releases) and try to build an up-to-date Ada compiler toolchain with it.

However, that would be a lot of work to get going and it may require a 
lot of trial and error for it to fully work. I was thinking that maybe 
it would be best to start with the Alire binary that, while larger and 
against the Guix philosophy, will initially provide an up-to-date Ada 
toolchain easily and it would allow Ada programs to be added to Guix 
quite easily and quickly. Then, as time passes, we can try to get rid of 
it with the use of Debian binaries. That way we can test and ensure that 
the path towards smaller binaries still works and compiles software 
correctly. Hopefully I expressed myself correctly and hopefully this 
proposal gets accepted. I would like to put emphasis on the "temporary" 
part of this solution. The goal is to not have any binaries whatsoever, 
but we can start with a large and easy to work with binary and slowly 
work our way to having none of it. What do you all think?

[1] https://github.com/AdaCore/bb-runtimes
[2] https://github.com/gabriele-galeotti/SweetAda

Best regards,
Fer