Below is the file 'debian/README.source' from this revision. You can also download the file.

The upstream SourceForge repository has switched to svn. However,
there are no stable releases from the svn repository yet.

The upstream CVS head was not officially released from SourceForge; we
call that version 1.6.2 here.

The SourceForge GNADE distribution uses autotools to create some
files. We do not use autotools in the Debian build. We suppress the
lintian error for the out-of-date autotools files in the GNADE source
in source.lintian-overrides.

Many Ada files in GNADE import C structs and functions. Those imports
must be manually checked against the corresponding C header files
(given in Ada comments) for each soname change in the corresponding C
library. This was not done for gnade releases before Debian 1.6.2-2.

An exception is dbi/odbc/*. ODBC is a psuedo-standard; there is strong
incentive for it to not change. So we are assuming those imports are
ok.

The SQLite3 API appears to be very stable (and cleanly designed).

The GNADE MySQL code clearly does not match the current C headers for
libmysqlclient.

The GNADE postgre code uses some very questionable techniques in
interfacing to C.

The gesql preprocessor generates a lot of warnings from the gnat
compiler. In the process of eliminating those warnings, it became
clear the gesql is broken.

Therefore we package only odbc and SQLite3.

debian/control restricts the version of each C library to a range that
should guarantee no C API changes. When the dependency cannot be
satisfied, it is time to check the C headers again.