Subject: bug#78821: severe build difficulties overcome only by severe stubbonness

From: Lucas Veltkamp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:16:59 +0100

Package: emacs, ada-mode

I just wanted to report issues building the source for emacs ada mode
on my debian trixie and bookworm machines (x_86 and arm64
respectively). Alire does not work full stop to build it, with the
error: 

>ada_annex_p.re2c:105: note: macro "YYDEBUG" defined here
>ada_annex_p_re2c.c:18729:10: error: macro "YYDEBUG" requires 2
>arguments, but only 1 given

repeated again and again. I tried with different versions of gnat, and
different versions of the alr package to no avail. Building using the
makefile installed when getting the package through the emacs
repositories produced the same issue, but only because it uses alr by
default, if available. Editing the build file to remove all reference
to alr gets it to build. 
There were smaller issues, which are probably worth mentioning too. The
build script, edited to remove alire references, only works if you
change the call to gnatprove to the actual name of the binary on your
system (which unfortunately varies in debian with the form gnatprove-
$GCCVERSIONNUM). Further, it builds by default with 8 jobs, an oddly
specific number which happens to outnumber the cores on my arm machine
(this is very very minor but I thought if I'm making a list...). The
install script works (I removed reference to alr there too), apart from
the fact that it does not copy across the requisite txt file
(ada_annex_p_lr1_re2c_parse_table.txt), so you need to do that by hand.

If these errors just occur because I'm stupid or missing some
documentation, I apologise. Thank you for working on this package.

yours,
Lucas