Please keep package up-to-date in Debian/Ubuntu

[gr1mpatr0n]

It seems @stcarrez is the maintainer of the Debian package for Alire, and should have received several pings about the package being stuck on 1.2.

Please can you update to 2.1.0 as 1.2 is over 3 years old at this point.

[stcarrez]

Yes, I received them and tried to update.... but....

Due to the Debian Ada Policy, the integration of Alire is difficult because they impose us to use the libraries that are already packaged by Debian. One of them is gnatcoll but it is an old version and Alire is using the latest sources thanks to the gitmodules. I tried to adapt (by doing a patch, which is the normal Debian integration process) but it turns out that it was complex (a lot of changes are necessary).

I've been in touch with the Ada Debian maintainers in the past, and it is very difficult to explain the constraint that we have and try to make an exception. Due to my past interaction with them, I've been discouraged to even expose the issue in the Ada Debian mailing list. This is sad because having some official Alire package in Debian (and then Ubuntu) would be very useful.

I was doing this in my spare time, which is limited, and to be honest, I prefer to write code in Ada rather than enter in endless discussions about how the Alire package must be patched and adapted for some out-dated policy.

[gr1mpatr0n]

Thanks for your efforts, Stephane. To clarify, are you saying that the vendored submodules in deps cannot be used because the Ada Debian policy requires us to use prepackaged Ada libraries?

Is that still the case if those libraries are just linked statically?

[stcarrez]

The Ada Debian policy says that if a dynamic library exist, the Ada binary must be linked with it. It is fine to use deps libraries which are not available in Debian. The first version of Alire package that I submitted was linked statically with libraries found in the deps, including gnatcoll and xmlezout and they refused the package. I had to patch so that gnatcoll and xmlezout are compiled and linked against the Debian installed packages. In doing so, I was loosing my time, but it was acceptable since it worked.